HighScope Learning
The HighScope Curriculum is uniquely designed to provide a rich academic foundation while promoting independence, decision making, cooperation, creativity, and problem solving in young children. How? The HighScope Curriculum includes learning objectives, effective adult interaction strategies, and assessment measures that help programs ensure a high-quality experience for all learners.
Play-based, child-centered, and grounded in research, the HighScope Curriculum features active learning at its core. In a HighScope classroom, children are guided to explore, interact, and exercise their creative imagination through purposeful play. Well-prepared teachers support and extend each child’s learning based on their developmental levels, so children enter school ready and eager to learn.
Adult-Child Interaction
Nurturing, responsive teachers practice primary caregiving and continuity of care by scaffolding the individual needs and temperaments of infants and toddlers. Key strategies for adult-child interactions are touching, holding, playing alongside infants and toddlers at their level and pace, communicating in give-and-take exchanges verbally and nonverbally, respecting children’s choices and encouraging their efforts, acknowledging children’s strong emotions, and involving toddlers in resolving conflicts.
Learning Environment
The physical space is safe, flexible, and child oriented to provide comfort and accommodate the changing developmental needs and interests of the earliest learners. The space is organized into play and care areas that serve the needs of infants and toddlers and stocked with a variety of sensory-motor materials that infants and toddlers can reach, explore, and play with in their own way at their own pace. With nurturing and responsive caregivers as a home base, infants and toddlers are free to move about, explore materials, exercise creativity, and solve problems.
Schedules and Routines
A consistent yet flexible routine that accommodates individual children’s natural rhythms and temperaments gives infants and toddlers a sense of security and stability that creates trust between the child and teacher and builds independence as children engage with their environment and the people around them. Each routine is built around daily events and caregiving routines that value infants’ and toddlers’ active learning.
Observation
Ongoing child and program assessment is an underlying component of the HighScope Curriculum. Objective observations of children allow teachers to intentionally plan to build on individual and group interests and scaffold development by supporting what children know while gently extending their learning.