Best Practice Curriculum

A Constructivist Perspective on Learning and Teaching

Developmentally appropriate early childhood programs are built on the belief that meaningful learning - the meaningful understanding of concepts and ideas - is constructed over time by the individual child. Rooted in the developmental theory of Jean Piaget, quality programs recognize that children need multiple and varied experiences with the physical and social world in order to construct their understandings of how the physical world works, how sounds and words can be combined to communicate ideas, and how people can cooperate and function together. These understandings cannot simply be transmitted through instruction from the adult world to the children. Children can learn to parrotback information through rote learning and imitation but true understanding takes time and is a result of the child's continual effort at constructing her own meaning.

Although knowledge is a personal construction according to Piaget's theory, the social and cultural world, in the form of people and tools, supports this personal construction. Drawing on the work of the Russian developmental psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, Little Leprechaun educational programs are designed to provide experiences that "scaffold" the child's learning. "Scaffolding" is a way of providing assistance and support so that a child can accomplish a desired task. By providing the assistance, children develop the sense of competency and success that motivates them to keep working at the task or problem. When the time is right, the assistance is removed and the child is now able to complete the task independently. "Scaffolding" is a process that continually helps the child move from assisted performance to independent performance.

Multiple Ways of Learning, Expressing, and Being

A basic philosophical belief behind Little Leprechaun's educational program is that each child comes to the educational setting as an individual in terms of personality, talents, and interests. At Little Leprechaun, we recognize that not everyone excels in all developmental areas or learns in the same fashion. In his "Theory of Multiple Intelligences," psychologist Howard Gardner has suggested that rather than one, general form of intelligence that can be used to describe (and separate) individuals, there are in fact eight different intelligences. People, according to Gardner, vary as to the degree of interest or talent they may have in any one of these areas.

According to Gardner, the eight intelligences are: