Early Learning and Childcare
– Anglophone sector
The New Brunswick Curriculum Framework for Early Learning and Childcare~English employs a social pedagogical approach to supporting broad based learning goals for preschool children. This approach recognizes the context of children’s learning and the importance of attending to the todayness of children’s lives and their diverse personal, social, and cultural experiences. A curriculum framework grounded in this approach has the simultaneous effect of promoting over well-being and capacity for learning.
Vision
The vision of the New Brunswick Curriculum Framework for Early Learning and Childcare is that all children will grow to their fullest potential with dignity, a sense of self-worth, and a zest for living and learning. It is a holistic vision that seeks to provide the environment and resources needed to support dynamic development in young children who are:
- curious, courageous, and confident in their pursuit of knowledge and skills,
- secure in their linguistic and cultural identities,
- respectful of diversity; and
- contributing to the development of a just and democratic society that nurtures connection and care for life on the earth.
The uniqueness of each child is implicitly integrated into the philosophy of early learning and child care that is embedded within the framework.
Purpose
The New Brunswick Curriculum Framework for Early Learning and Child Care — English addresses this need by providing the foundation for an emergent and engaging curriculum for children from birth to five, one that will encourage optimum development in an atmosphere of trust, security, and respect.
Suited for home-based and centre-based care, the framework can be used as a source of information for parents, early childhood educators, and other professionals. It is intended to facilitate continuity of learning and care by connecting to diverse home practices, linking with other community-based programs and supports, and complementing the school curriculum.
Learners in Early Learning and Childcare are:
- Curious, competent, and confident in their pursuit of knowledge and skills.
- Secure in their linguistic and cultural identities.
- Respectful of diversity.
- Contributing to the development of a just and democratic society that nurtures connection and care for life on the earth.
Learners in Early Learning and Childcare need:
- Inclusive and engaging learning environments that nurture relationships.
- Opportunities to explore, question, experiment, hypothesize, investigate and play.
- Exposure to multiple learning communities that honour home languages, the culture and languages of the Mi’kmaq, Wolasteqey, and Peskotomuhkati Nations; the official languages of New Brunswick; as well as visible minority and ethnocultural groups within various communities of learning.
Learners in Early Learning and Childcare experience:
Well-being is important to all human beings. For young children and their families, a positive sense of well-being is nurtured through participation in an environment that is consistent and where respectful, responsive relationships and community connections are valued. Children actively co-construct their identities in relation to the people, places, and things within the various communities to which they belong. Communities that support persistence, perseverance, and pleasure promote a zest for living and learning. Children have the right to feel safe. When provided with the space and freedom to take healthy risks, their willingness to do so reflects a sense of security, self-confidence, courage, and body strength. Over time, participation in healthy risk taking builds the skills, knowledge, and resolve that will sustain them as they face new pleasures and challenges.
At play, children are empowered to learn on their own terms, in their own ways, and in their own time; this freedom is what distinguishes play from other activities. Play allows children to take the initiative, to test their physical and mental limits, and to explore positions of power and questions about good and evil. In play, children use words and symbols to transform the world around them, creating worlds where they can act “as if” rather than “as is.” Play is a pleasurable and highly motivating context in which children can explore possibilities and solve problems that are beyond their reach in ordinary life.
Early childhood communities that acknowledge the educative and developmental potential of play make provisions for a range of different kinds of play: playful exploration and heuristic play, for children to learn about the physical properties of materials and rules of thumb for problem solving; constructional play, for them to invent new connections as they design and create with mud, sand, twigs, cardboard, and blocks; socio-dramatic play, so that they can take up cultural roles and practices, play out their hopes fears and dreams, test relations of power, and imaginatively explore new possibilities; board games and word games, songs and rhymes that require deep concentration or just invite fooling around with language in order to take possession of it; games of courage and chance; outdoor play that exercises the muscles, lungs, heart, and mind — running, jumping, digging, swinging, rolling, and strolling; and shouting and squeaking and twirling and swirling — dizzy play for the pure pleasure of being on the edge and sharing the joy of laughter and life with others.
Children communicate right from birth. Sounds, silences, pauses, gestures, movement, eye contact, and body language — our first modes of communication — stay with us throughout our lifetimes. Children interpret and re-invent their worlds using multiple forms of communication and representation. Children learn to express, represent, and interpret their feelings, ideas, and questions through speaking, listening, reading, writing, dancing, singing, drawing, moving, and constructing. They learn these wide-ranging literate practices through their interactions with others and within particular social and cultural contexts.
What it means to be literate changes over time and place, and within and across cultures. In the twenty-first century, technological innovations are shifting the meaning of being literate from a dominant focus on language and print to a multimodal literacies approach. Multimodal literacies involve the simultaneous use of the modes of image, print, gaze, gesture, movement, speech, and/or sound effects. Reading picture books, fiction and nonfiction, is one of the most accessible and popular multimodal forms of literacy engagement. Other forms include, singing, painting, dramatic play, blockbuilding, photography, television, and computers.
Through their participation in various communities, children contribute to changes in what it means to be literate. This is because they are active rather than passive learners in the process of making sense of their worlds. They both influence and are influenced by language and literacy practices in their homes, neighbourhoods, and wider communities. Children’s personal, social, and literate identities are co-constructed in their interactions with others, and by the expectations held by others for example, gendered expectations. Children’s creations and productions tell us who they think they are and who they might like to be.
Membership in communities involves interdependency. It is as simple and as complicated as this: we need to take care of each other, and we need to take care of the natural and constructed world around us. When children engage in respectful, responsive, and reciprocal relationships guided by sensitive and knowledgeable adults, they grow in their understanding of interdependency.
We live in a democratic country. Ideally, early childhood communities reflect the democratic values of inclusiveness and equity. All children and families have equal rights to a voice in decision making; differences and dissent make valued contributions to the group. With the inclusion of diverse heritages, histories, and customs, democratic principles are honoured, opportunities to learn from each other are enriched, and possibilities for living peacefully together are enhanced.
As children practise living with heart and spirit as well as with mind, they require caring adults who listen responsively to what they have to say. They learn to find their voices, to speak freely, and to hear the voices of others as they engage in matters that concern them. Cultivating an understanding of interdependency and the practice of compassionate care moves beyond the boundaries of local contexts and extends to global citizenship, appreciating biodiversity and environmental responsibility. This involves learning in and about the natural world, and learning how to act in environmentally responsible ways to become good stewards of the earth.
In early learning settings, environments that embrace diversity, Wabanaki Nations and foster social responsibility play a crucial role in creating a safe and supportive space for children and families. When children and families see their identities, cultures, and experiences reflected and respected in the classroom, they feel a deep sense of belonging and emotional security. This sense of safety encourages children to take risks, express themselves, and engage more fully in learning.
Social responsibility is nurtured by providing children opportunities to understand their role in caring for others, contributing to their communities, and respecting the environment. Through inclusive opportunities, collaborative play, and meaningful relationships with caring adults, children learn empathy, fairness, and how to become responsible and responsive members of the community. These early experiences shape their sense of identity and prepare them to become compassionate, engaged citizens in a diverse and interconnected world.
Early Learning
Goal: WELL-BEING
Facet: EMOTIONAL HEALTH AND POSITIVE IDENTITIES
ASPECT: Children develop a sense of self.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN THE LEARNING: Developing recognition of self; co-construction their identities; experiencing growing self confidence, self respect, and ability to take initiative; growing in their capacity to express feelings, concerns and needs; pursuing interests, passions, and strengths; being curious and questioning.
ASPECT: Children develop a sense of other.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Supporting, encouraging, and listening to others; caring for others; experiencing trust and compassion with children and adults; learning constructive ways to negotiate a range of relationships.
Facet: BELONGING
ASPECT: Children develop a sense of place.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN THE LEARNING: Negotiating new spaces; identifying, creating, and using personal landmarks; becoming familiar with the sights, sounds, rhythms, and routines of new situations; generating a shared repertoire of narratives and memories; making connections between the centre, home, and broader communities.
ASPECT: Children build respectful and responsive relationships.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Developing cherished as well as casual friendships; forming close relationships with a range of adults; growing in their awareness that their actions contribute to the well-being of others; participating in group initiatives.
Facet: PHYSICAL HEALTH
ASPECT: Children take responsibility for personal care.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Growing independence in self-care routines; learning about individual differences in self-care practices; helping others with personal care.
ASPECT: Children learn about food and nutrition.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Understanding the relationship between food and their bodies; building confidence to try new foods; exploring a range of cultural practices of eating and sharing food; making decisions about food consumption, preparation, serving, and clean-up routines.
ASPECT: Children explore body and movement.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Participating in a variety of physical activities indoors and out; learning about their body in space; increasing bodily awareness, control strength, agility, and large muscle coordination; increasing fine motor capacities; knowing and stretching physical limits; releasing and restoring energy in outdoor places.
Goal: PLAY & PLAYFULNESS
Facet: IMAGINATION AND CREATIVITY
ASPECT: Children develop dispositions for flexible and fluid thinking.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Seeing people, places, and things in new ways; expressing unique and imaginative ideas.
ASPECT: Children Invent symbols and develop systems of representation.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Making up their own words, marks, and movements; negotiating the meaning of symbols with others; developing awareness of the imagined and ordinary worlds they move between as they play.
ASPECT: Children create imaginary scenarios in which to explore new possibilities and take possession of their worlds.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Creating social space and shared narratives; creating alternative systems of power; coping with emotional pressure.
Facet: PLAYFUL EXPLORATION AND PROBLEM SOLVING
ASPECT: Children learn about the properties of objects.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Playfully exploring and investigating the properties of objects; experimenting with action and reactions, cause, and effect; creating patterns and relationships – sorting and matching, sizing, and ordering, sequencing, and grouping; developing a vocabulary to describe similarities and differences, patterns, and relationships.
ASPECT: Children test their limits.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Testing their powers of observation and sensory discrimination; testing strength, speed, agility, and control over movement.
ASPECT: Children learn to negotiate the complexities of joint undertakings.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Negotiating rules of time, space, and roles; making collective plans and decisions about the directions of play; developing a sense of fair play.
ASPECT: Children learn to employ creative approaches to identifying and working out practical problems.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Developing sustained, shared thinking; raising questions and making hypotheses about how and why things happen; choosing from a range of materials, tools, and languages to investigate, experiment, and make their thinking visible.
Facet: DIZZY PLAY
ASPECT: Children take pleasure in being on the edge.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Engaging in rough and tumble play; experiencing exhilarating physical release; playing at games of disrupting and restoring order.
ASPECT: Children take pleasure in sharing the joy of laughter.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Making nonsense; clowning and physical humour.
Goal: COMMUNICATIONS & LITERACIES
Facet: COMMUNICATIVE PRACTICES
ASPECT: Children form relationships through communicative practices.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Recognizing and responding to human presence and touch; becoming attuned to rhyme, rhythm, pitch, tone, and vibrations; practicing and playing with sounds; initiating and responding to gestural and visual language.
ASPECT: Children learn conventions of their languages.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Growing in their understanding of languages conventions; growing in their understanding of vocabulary; developing confidence in using languages; growing in their understanding of how others use languages; experiencing and developing diverse linguistic repertoires.
ASPECT: Children extend ideas and take actions using language.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Using language to express thoughts, feelings, and ideas; using language to make friends, share information, argue, persuade, clarify, celebrate, instruct, or tell stories.
Facet: MULTI-MODAL LITERACIES
ASPECT: Children explore a variety of sign systems.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Becoming familiar with the sign systems of language, music, math, art, and drama; engaging in multiple forms of representation; transforming knowledge from one mode to another.
ASPECT: Children engage in multimodal meaning making.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Engaging with the symbols and practices of language (foregrounding the language, tools, and practices of print); engaging with the symbols and practices of music (foregrounding the language, tools, and practices of music); engaging with the symbols and practices of math (foregrounding the language, tools, and practices of math); engaging with the symbols and practices of art (foregrounding the language, tools, and practices of art); engaging with the symbols and practices of drama (foregrounding the language, tools, and practices of drama).
Facet: LITERATE IDENTITIES WITH/IN COMMUNITIES
ASPECT: Children co-construct a range of literate identities.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Creating texts, reflective if family, local, and global literacies; learning various local literacy practices within a range of communities; learning the uniqueness and similarities of their family’s literacies and those of others.
ASPECT: Children engage critically in the literacy practices of popular culture.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Transporting and transforming the literacies of popular culture from home into the centre; exploring various identities and characters embedded in popular culture; growing in their capacity to ask critical questions about stereotypes represented in popular culture.
ASPECT: Children use the literacy tools of digital technologies.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Representing their experiences with technologies in everyday life; accessing and using digital technologies.
Goal: DIVERSITY & SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
Facet: INCLUSIVENESS AND EQUITY
ASPECT: Children appreciate their own distinctiveness and that of others.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Learning about their cultural heritages and those of other families in the centre and broader society; becoming knowledgeable and confident in their various identities, including cultural, physical, racial, spiritual, linguistic, gender, social, and economic.
ASPECT: Children engage in practices that respect diversity.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Forming positive, inclusive relationships with all children; learning about differences, including cultural, racial, physical, gender, spiritual, linguistic, social, and economic; learning about and engaging with communities representative of New Brunswick society (First Nations, English and French, Established immigrant families, and new Canadians); learning about, and participating in, projects that help others – locally and globally.
ASPECT: Children raise questions and act to change inequitable practices that exclude or discriminate.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Recognizing and challenging inequitable practices and situations; negotiating equitable solutions to problems that arise from differences, including cultural, racial, spiritual, physical, linguistic, developmental, gender, social, and economic; standing up for themselves and others in a fair manner.
Facet: DEMOCRATIC PRACTICES
ASPECT: Children learn to be responsible and responsive members of the community.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Showing sympathy and empathy for others; giving help, comfort and encouragement, and valuing others’ contributions; respecting the materials, equipment and spaces shared with others.
ASPECT: Children practice democratic decision-making, making choices in matters that affect them.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Beginning to understand their rights and responsibilities, and those of others; voicing their preferences and opinions, and developing an awareness of others’ points of view; questioning, co-constructing, and reworking rules and procedures.
ASPECT: Children practice fairness and social justice.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Voicing and negotiating their understandings of fairness and unfairness; identifying issues and becoming socially active in their local communities.
Facet: SUSTAINABLE FUTURES
ASPECT: Children develop a sense of wonder and appreciation for the natural world.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Bringing all their senses to exploring nature – plants, animals, people, landscapes, weather, and habitat; taking pleasure in natural beauty; connecting to and respecting the natural world.
ASPECT: Children learn to recognize and record patterns and relationships in nature.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Noticing regularity, repetition, and changes in nature; learning to systematically observe, name, and record natural phenomena; raising questions about changes, connections and causes and undertaking first-hand investigations.
ASPECT: Children develop a sense of appreciation for human creativity and innovation.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Bringing all their senses to exploring the constructed world; learning to appreciate beauty, creativity and innovation in art, architecture, and technologies; exploring the mechanical advantage of tools and machinery; designing and evaluating technological solutions.
ASPECT: Children learn about natural resource development and manufacturing.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Making connections between raw materials and finished products; developing an appreciation for the work of others; learning that different approaches to resource development and production have different impacts.
ASPECT: Children learn environmentally and socially responsible practices.
WHAT’S INVOLVED IN LEARNING: Reducing consumption; reusing and recycling; participating in the care of plants and domestic animals, and stewardship of local plant, insect, and animal life; participating in local restoration and regeneration projects.
