Principles

Current research evidence, professional knowledge and practitioner wisdom identify six principles about early learning and development, and early childhood pedagogy. The principles are the foundation for practices that support all children making progress in achieving the essential outcomes.

1. Early development launches children’s trajectories for learning.

Self-regulation is the cornerstone of development and is the central building block of early learning. Self-regulation is the ability to adapt one’s emotions, behaviours and attention to the demands of the situation. Attention skills, working memory and cognitive flexibility underlie planning and problem-solving. The capacity to make inferences about others’ mental states, such as intentions, emotions, desires and beliefs, is used to interpret behaviour and regulate social interactions. The regulation of attention is essential to children’s learning dispositions or habits of mind and action, including persistence, curiosity and approaching new experiences with confidence.

Self-regulation is not about compliance with external authorities – it is about establishing one’s own internal motivation for adapting to, and understanding emotional and social demands. In fact for many children, requiring compliance undermines their own abilities to self-regulate.

Programs for young children provide opportunities for educators to structure the environment, guide and provide feedback to children. This is other-regulation – the educator is regulating the child’s activities. As the child’s own abilities grow, the educator’s guidance diminishes and the child takes on her own planning, monitoring and self-evaluation thus regulating her own behaviour and attention. Other-regulation is also the child’s ability to regulate other people’s behaviour and attention during shared experiences. Children are often able to remind peers about group behaviour rules (e.g. no running in the halls) or the rules of play as they are learning.

By the time children are four and five years old, basic voluntary regulatory systems are established and they are now building their abilities, and underlying neural pathways to intentionally attend and adapt to situations. Children’s abilities to think symbolically are accompanied by the ability to represent feelings, intentions and actions in words, play, drawings and block constructions. Children can build bridges between ideas, connecting feelings, facts and new understandings about how the world works through continual reciprocal interactions with others. The child’s environment and interactions can enhance or detract from that neural platform. Educators can seek out opportunities to capitalize on a child’s strengths and build strategies to address challenges.

Children need opportunities to practice the tools of self-regulation to support their individual learning strategies: how to plan, monitor, revise, reflect, investigate and solve problems, to see and exchange points of view with others and to represent ideas. Through observation and action, children form their own hypotheses, try them out, find out what happens and formulate their own answers. Children develop learning strategies from first-hand actions with objects in their world, and from exchanging points of view with peers and adults.

A child’s increasing ability to regulate emotion, behaviour and attention characterizes the growth from the helplessness of a newborn to competence in the social, emotional, language, cognitive and physical domains of development. Early brain development establishes a neural platform for self-regulation. A strong and flexible neural foundation for self-regulation can broaden learning possibilities. This foundation is not finished or static; it is a foundation that needs to be nourished in order to meet ever expanding social, emotional and cognitive demands.

2. Partnerships with parents and communities strengthen the ability of Early Learning Programs to meet the needs of young children.

Children’s learning and development happens within the context of their daily lives and events in families and communities. Parents are children's first and most powerful teachers and role models. A warm and intimate family atmosphere is conducive for optimal learning. Parents offer learning opportunities that are based on the deep knowledge they have of their children.

Parents’ comfort with the school happens over time and Early Learning Programs should provide time to nurture family and community involvement. Parents and other caregivers who are able to offer their knowledge about their child with educators will be more supportive of children's learning. Children whose parents are engaged with the school and their own learning come to view school more positively. When parents are able to share their children’s home and community experiences, educators are better able to meet the individual learning needs of children. Active involvement offers opportunities for parents to learn from educators. Mutual respect for each other’s knowledge and contributions benefit children as educators learn about children from their parents and parents learn about their children from educators.

Most children entering the Early Learning Program will have participated in other early childhood programs in their communities. By building links with programs for younger children, the Early Learning Program contributes to a continuum of learning that bridges the transition into community schools.

3. Respect for diversity, equity and inclusion are prerequisites for honouring children’s rights, optimal development and learning.

Children bring to school traditional practices, values and the beliefs and experiences of their families and communities. Ontario is a province of many cultures and languages and early childhood programs need to reflect those differences. Environments that promote attitudes and beliefs that support equity, diversity and democracy, and are inclusive of children with special needs enable empathy and provide children with a strong sense of self in relation to others.

Quality early learning environments incorporate the diversity of their participants to enrich programming for all. All young children benefit from understanding the diversity of their communities. For example, Early Learning Programs in non-Aboriginal communities need content that respectfully incorporates Aboriginal knowledge.

Educators work to create an inclusive learning environment that reflects the diversity within their schools, communities and the wider society. Programming should adapt to a wide variety of individual differences and needs of children and their families. Learning experiences, resources and materials used in the Early Learning Program, must be free from bias and stereotyping so that children can make meaningful connections between what they are learning and their own backgrounds, experiences, and learning styles. Books should include fairy tales, stories from mythology, and tales about children and adults from diverse social, cultural, spiritual, and family contexts. Children also need books in their home languages that they can share with family members.

4. A planned program supports early learning and development.

Effective programs for young children begin with an informed understanding of how children learn and set specific goals for learning and development. Children have opportunities for sustained interactions with other children, guided by educators with an understanding of early child development. The result is a powerhouse combination that boosts children's self-regulation skills and underpins health, security, social and emotional competence, foundation knowledge and concepts, and social inclusion.

Literacy, numeracy and inquiry skills are often identified as key factors leading to success in school and for life skills. Every Child, Every Opportunity recognizes that four- and five-year-old children are competent learners who acquire literacy, numeracy, and inquiry skills, as well as social competence and emotional maturity that carry into the primary grades. The literacy and numeracy skills the child is acquiring are functional and not simply learned by rote.

Oral language is the basis for literacy, thinking and relating in any language. Language is a tool for making meaning. A planned program seeks out opportunities to make connections between concrete experiences and children’s representations. Children are able to ease into the more abstract world of literacy, acquiring decoding skills such as phonetic awareness and letter-sound recognition, along the way. Children begin to read pictures and print including labels, schedules, names, high-frequency words, and patterned and simple texts.

Young children have an intuitive knowledge of mathematics, which they have developed through curiosity about their physical world and through real-life experiences. Educators in Early Learning Programs should use this prior knowledge as a starting point in developing the critical foundational learning of mathematical principles and concepts that supports achievement in mathematics in later years.

Children are naturally curious about their surroundings. They have an interest in exploring and investigating to see how things work and why things happen. Early Learning Programs can capitalize on children’s natural curiosity and their desire to make sense of their environment.

Many different skills make up inquiry-based learning for children, and children need opportunities to develop and use these skills as they progress in Early Learning Programs. Children’s engagement with the inquiry process begins with noticing and wondering about the objects and events around them. They move to exploring, observing and questioning objects and events in a more focused way. Educators can support further investigation and children’s planning, systematic observations, gathering of information and then comparing, sorting, classifying and interpreting those observations. Educators can provide a rich variety of materials and resources, and strategically question and observe children to clarify, expand, or discover the children’s thinking. Children can share their findings with each other through discussions and representations, reinforcing emerging literacy skills.

Children begin to ask questions that lead to exploration and investigation. Children begin to communicate ideas and questions while they are experimenting and investigating by describing materials they used, indicating a problem they might have had, or beginning to listen to their peers or offer suggestions to them. They also learn to make predictions and draw conclusions.

Investigation involves formulating questions and finding out about something. Representation involves describing phenomena to oneself or communicating descriptions or ideas to others. As investigation and representation are undertaken young children involved in real world studies seem inevitably to be developing skills and concepts which are associated with several curriculum subjects at once.

5. Play is the means to early learning.

Young children actively explore their environment and the world around them through a process of learning-based play – for example, manipulating objects, acting out roles, and experimenting with various materials. Play is a vehicle for learning and lies at the core of innovation and creativity. It provides opportunities for learning in a context in which children are at their most receptive. Play and academic work are not distinct categories for young children, and learning and doing are also inextricably linked for them.

Children who thrive in primary school are those who have strong communication skills, are able to make friends, are persistent and creative in completing tasks and solving problems and are excited to learn. They have developed their abilities to imagine, use mental representations, act in a deliberate planned manner and integrate emotions and thinking. Socio-dramatic or pretend play complemented by constructive play strengthens these same qualities.

When children are fully engaged in their play, their activity and learning is integrated across developmental domains. They seek out challenges that can be accomplished.

Recognizing and engaging in pretense (the central characteristic of dramatic or pretend play) involves an intricate set of activities and understandings. Pretend play is a form of communication that requires the participants to communicate with each other, using language gestures and symbolic gestures to tell and retell stories. Pretense supports children’s self-regulation which subsequently optimizes their potential to learn from engaging with people and resources in their environment. Children use language and thinking skills to compare and plan, investigate materials, problem solve, experiment, negotiate and evaluate in pretend play.

Mature, complex pretend play deeply involves children as they try out a variety of roles and scenarios which facilitate joint planning, perspective-taking and mental representation. Pretend play expands children’s growing theory of mind – that is, their understanding that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different than their own. Socio-dramatic play is about negotiation and getting along with others, often overcoming different perspectives and backgrounds.

Socio-dramatic play contributes to literacy acquisition. Pretend play requires children to determine tasks and goals, to carry them out, and provides opportunities for narrative recall and use of complex language. Children in complex pretend play situations use more advanced language and have higher levels of narrative structure than they do in other situations. Children become storytellers, composing new stories and creating new versions of familiar stories. The ability to use narrative and more advanced oral language are linked to later reading comprehension and fluency. When literacy materials are embedded within play setting, children increase their use of literacy materials and engagement in literacy acts. By using and creating environmental print in their pretend play, children begin to understand what reading is and how print works. Pretend play helps children develop schemas and scripts as organized mental structures that are applied to understanding print. Pretend play contributes to a sense of narrative that is essential to moving from learning to read, to reading to learn in the primary grades.

Through play, children learn trust, empathy and social skills. A true sense of ‘‘interpersonal nuance’’ can be achieved only by a child who is engaging all available senses by playing in the three-dimensional world.

Constructive play involves drawing, painting, and building and often is connected to, or intertwined with, pretend play. Drawing and painting evolve from scribbles to sophisticated symbols. Scribbles become lines that convey meaning. When the two ends of a line are joined, shapes emerge and children begin to use shapes as symbols. Drawing and painting are an integral part of children’s first attempts to use symbols to communicate meaning as fine motor control increases. Children can use drawing and painting to record their play experiences and extend their abilities for symbolic representation and explore their feelings.

Building with blocks as a shared experience supports children’s regulation of behaviour and attention and the coordination of roles. Children must plan together, using language to discuss the construction. Representational drawings can expand children’s planning and the complexity of the structures that children create.

6. Knowledgeable and responsive educators are essential.

The quality of pedagogy is critical to effective program delivery of Every Child, Every Opportunity in the Early Learning Program.

Responsive educators are attuned to children’s actions, thoughts and feelings. They notice how individual children respond to different types of sensory stimulation and interactions with others.

Educators recognize their own learning is a continuous and reciprocal process. They learn from each other and from children and their families. They value the local knowledge and wisdom shared by community members, including Aboriginal elders.

Effective programs are informed by research that is not limited to academics. Educators who are reflective practitioners can integrate theoretical frameworks, research findings, their own daily experiences and their creativity to guide their interactions with young children and their families. They perform a complex and multidimensional role that challenges, engages, responds to cultural and linguistic diversity, and promotes positive outcomes for all children. They implement a program that is thoughtfully planned but are able to adjust their practice to suit the immediate time and place. Reflective educators gather information, examine experiences from different perspectives and gain insights that guide their decision-making about children’s learning.

Planning of children’s learning is based on professional inquiry in the Early Learning Program. Educators respond to each child’s development and the overall development of the community of children in their group. As they orchestrate the learning environment, educators closely observe and document each child’s progress. They take part in an ongoing cycle of review and examine and debate issues such as curriculum quality, inclusion, equity and diversity. The mark of success is a child who is an active and eager learner, not one who can recite facts.

Pedagogical leadership contributes to an environment that encourages responsiveness. The work environment influences adults’ responsiveness to children, families and communities. Early Learning Programs need an infrastructure of support that facilitates time for program planning, observation and documentation, opportunities for professional development and regular conversations with families.

School administrators can support and value the development, implementation and evaluation of a coherent curriculum. They set the stage with school practices that respect all families; provide leadership in developing a vision and philosophy to guide curriculum and pedagogy; and, create a workplace that values the practice of educators.

Every Child, Every Opportunity
Curriculum and Pedagogy for the Early Learning Program
A compendium report to 'With Our Best Future in Mind: Implementing Early Learning in Ontario'

Overview and Acknowledgements

Foreword

About This Document

Principles

Practice of Interaction

Essential Outcomes

Next Steps

Endnotes

Principles

1. Early development launches children’s trajectories for learning.

2. Partnerships with parents and communities strengthen the ability of Early Learning Programs to meet the needs of young children.

3. Respect for diversity, equity and inclusion are prerequisites for honouring children’s rights, optimal development and learning.

4. A planned program supports early learning and development.

5. Play is the means to early learning.

6. Knowledgeable and responsive educators are essential.

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