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Our Curriculum
Our curriculum, Mother Goose Time©, is a research-based early learning program developed by Experience Early Learbning© that uniquely weaves 35 research-based skills into playful games and projects. As children participate, they naturally grow in all areas of development, including social-emotional, physical, language, and cognitive development.
Make Meaningful with Themes
Themes help preschoolers construct knowledge and build connections through real experiences. Instead of having a day of disjointed activities, themes organize new information around a unified context, which results in a growing web of knowledge.
Each theme creatively integrates colors, shapes, numbers, and letters of the month.
Monthly themes invite children to explore new ideas with an interdisciplinary, multi-sensory approach. Experience Curriculum uses music, art, dramatic play, storytelling, games, books, and experiments to ignite imagination and bring the theme to life in four weeks of wonder.
Social and Emotional Development
Social-emotional development refers to a child’s ability to identify feelings, self-regulate and build relationships.
High-quality relationships correlate to positive outcomes for young children (Shonkoff, 2004). Brain research verifies that emotional and cognitive development are interrelated (Bell & Wolf, 2004). Young children who have strong social and emotional development are more likely to have good academic performance in future schooling (Cohen, 2005). Therefore, Mother Goose Time integrates a social-emotional component into each lesson plan.
Mathematics and Reasoning Development
Mathematics and reasoning skills include a child’s ability to count, understand number sense, manipulate objects, create patterns, sort, compare and measure.
Research on children’s learning in the first six years of life validates the importance of early experiences in mathematics for lasting positive outcomes (Bowman, Donovan & Burns, 2001). Through Mother Goose Time curriculum, children develop the ability to reason mathematically and become increasingly sophisticated in the ability to recognize and analyze the mathematics inherent in the world around them (Baroody, Bajwa & Eiland, 2009).
Language and Literacy Development
Language and literacy skills refer to a child’s ability to communicate and connect with others through listening, speaking, reading and writing.
Learning language is a social experience and requires symbolic processing. The relationship between thought and word is “not a thing, but a process, a continual movement back and forth from thought to word and from word to thought” (Vygotsky, 1962, p. 125). Mother Goose Time is a literacy-rich curriculum and invites children to ask questions and explore ideas through discussion and dramatic play. Moreover, we encourage children to construct autobiographical narratives in the form of storytelling, journaling and drawing. Language skills are some of the best predictors of academic success (Snowling, Hulme, Bailey, Strothard & Lindsay, 2011).
Science Development
Science skills include a child’s ability to inquire, predict and evaluate observations. It supports a child’s ability to explore everyday life, physical properties of matter, and to make sense of concepts such as weather, natural habitats, and technology.
Similar to learning to count or read, learning how to “do” science is a process. Metacognitive skills develop as children describe what they see, ask questions about it, repeat the experience, and then think about how it connects to what they know about their surrounding environment (Ashbrook, 2003). Mother Goose Time includes science-based projects and processes throughout the curriculum because science discovery serves as an ideal conduit for supporting children’s learning across different domains (French, 2004).
