Welcome to Child Centered Learning. I bet you are wondering why I chose to create a web site about this subject. A few years ago I was introduced to this concept in a pre-school environment. I owned a child care center a couple of years ago and attempted to promote this concept of learning
What is Child Centered Learning?
The best definition I came cross is children that are mentally active and being challenged to think and will try to find a meaning and purpose for the activity.
Child-centered learning highlights collaboration: Instructors, child care providers and parents take their cues from the kids, drawing upon their interests, needs and natural curiosities.
Child Centered learning is a critical step for school readiness. In the age of computers and electronics, socialization skills are lost in pre-school. It’s much easier to be entertained then to interact with other children and work together as a team. Many of the kids I took care of did not know how to interact with other children.
In my child care center I did not call my day care workers ‘teachers’; I preferred to call them ‘facilitators’. Why? The children are in control of how they wish to learn. It’s the job of the facilitators to interact based on what the child shows as important and interesting to them. The facilitator encourages the interest and expands the curiosity thus increasing learning without the child realizing.
What we discovered in this environment the child would retain the information they learned instead of loosing it after a few days. The Child Centered environment encourages the love for knowledge, improve self esteem and learn a ways to discover life with/without a facilitator.
What about Infants & Toddlers with Child Centered Learning? How does this apply?
Infants may not be able to speak but hey do communicate their needs. It’s up to the parents and facilitators to pick up on the cues and work with them. Even at this age they begin to have interests, needs and favorite toys.
Child Centered Learning is about facilitating experiences with playing, touching and feeling things that encourage not only teaching the curriculum they require to enter school but doing it in a fun and exciting way.
Teach them the steps necessary to answer puzzling questions. Be that facilitator to answer the questions by taking them through the problem necessary to answer the questions.
Please go to my blog and learn more about this topic.
