Beautiful Beginnings: A Developmental Curriculum for Infants And Toddlers - Softcover

Helen H. Raikes, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Child, Youth and Family Studies at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. She received her doctorate in child development from Iowa State University. Previously, she has had teaching positions at the University of California, Davis, and at Iowa State University. Among other foci, she has maintained a career-long interest in secure base relationships for infants and toddlers and first created an attachment-based model while Director of Infant Toddler Programs and Director of Research at the SRI/Saint Elizabeth and Gallup Organization Child Development Center in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was also a Society for Research in Child Development Executive Policy Fellow at the Administration on Children, Youth and Families at the time the Early Head Start program began and co-directed the national research for that program. Today, her work focuses on programs for children in poverty, with special emphases on infants and toddlers, children at greatest risk, and optimal timing of intervention as it relates to developmental trajectories, school readiness, and later success, as well as on innovative continuous program improvement efforts using research and evaluation. She is a board member of the Nebraska Early Childhood Endowment Board, the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, and the Nebraska Children and Families Foundation and is a member of the National Forum on Early Childhood Program Evaluation.

Ms. Whitmer is an educator and early intervention and prevention specialist. She holds master's degrees in educational and administration and human development and the family. Ms. Whitmer has taught children of every age, has served as an elementary school administrator, and has traveled extensively to provide training and technical assistance for Early Head Start and Head Start Programs. Today she works primarily with parents and teachers, consulting on a variety of early childhood topics. In addition to curricula, a topic she is particularly passionate about is teacher development and renewal in the area of early childhood education.

Excerpted from Chapter 1 of Beautiful Beginnings: A Developmental Curriculum for Infants and Toddlers, by Helen Raikes, Ph.D., & Jane McCall Whitmer, M.S.

Copyright © 2006 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Makesha is a teacher in an infant care center. Four infants have been assigned to her, and they constitute her “family.†At the center, she is considered their primary caregiver. Makesha is fascinated by, and engaged in, watching and thinking about these four babies, all of whom are between 7 and 10 months old. She loves observing their new developments and finding ways for the babies to exercise their emerging skills. They develop so fast! Makesha often consults the curriculum used by the center for new ideas she can implement for each emerging stage. The curriculum also helps her look for things the babies can do that she might not have noticed.

Layla has just started working in a small child care center operating out of a community center. She is working in the infant room with the young infants, ages 6 weeks to 6 months. She admires their tiny fingers and toes and how the older ones struggle so mightily to master rolling over and sitting up. Layla tries to follow the example set by her coworkers, but sometimes they are busy. To tell the truth, other than carrying the babies around, she’s not always sure what to do with them. She wonders how she can help them learn and develop.

Rick is a teacher in a toddler center that uses the Beautiful Beginnings curriculum. The toddlers he cares for compose a rambunctious group of four to six, depending on the day of the week. Rick develops a daily schedule that includes new Beautiful Beginnings Experiences for the children that are based on their development and individual differences. His classroom is ready—all of the materials for a curriculum of toys and materials for children from 18 to 36 months are on hand, carefully arranged in baskets, trays, and bins, with their location in the classroom pictorially marked so children can find and return materials. Some are in shelves that only open when Rick can carefully supervise their use, whereas others are available at all times.

Looking around the classroom, an observer sees 28-month-old Tommy pouring water from one container to another, working within the water table to contain any spills as he begins this new Experience of controlled pouring. In another part of the classroom, Zia is carefully carrying a basket of beads to a mat. She sits on the mat and begins to string these large beads. Andrew and Alan are placing large blocks end to end. Rick brings them a basket of two small cars and illustrates pretending that the cars drive down a roadway. The boys’ eyes light up and they begin to imitate him. He is pleased because “pretending†was an Experience he had planned this week for these boys. He’d observed them putting the blocks end to end several times and thought they might be ready for the new pretending Experiences. He made a mental note to bring out the large steering wheel tomorrow to see if they expanded “pretending to drive†from today to this new arena. As Tommy finishes, Rick shows him how to put the two small containers back on the shelf and to select something else.

These stories illustrate why using a curriculum such as Beautiful Beginnings is so important in working with young children. Teachers, home visitors, program directors, and parents may ask, “Isn’t it enough just to offer lots of toys and a lot of love and affection? Why is such a curriculum necessary?â€

WHY A CURRICULUM IS NEEDED

Researchers and experts agree that an environment rich in opportunities helps infants and young children develop optimally. Several of the reasons why are detailed here.

Development Happens Quickly and Continually

Babies develop very, very quickly. At each new developmental stage, parents and teachers have opportunities to offer enriching experiences to babies. These experiences create foundations for the next stages of development. Beautiful Beginnings suggests appropriate experiences for infants and toddlers at each stage of development.

Brain Development Is Fostered by Rich Experiences

A well-researched, tested curriculum offers experiences that are well matched to development. Experiences of this nature are believed to stimulate neural connections in a baby’s rapidly developing brain.

The Planning Is Begun

It is difficult for loving, adult caregivers, despite all they may know about child development, to plan for new experiences in every area of development because developmental changes are so many and so frequent. A curriculum keeps developmental expectations in front of teachers, caregivers, and parents and leads them to understand child development and their own special children more deeply. The next section expands on each of these reasons for using a curriculum with infants and toddlers.

AN OVERVIEW OF THE BEAUTIFUL BEGINNINGS CURRICULUM

Some may still believe that curricula should be used in schools with older children, not with babies. Experienced infant/toddler teachers and directors may be concerned about babies being pushed to do things they do not want to do rather than following their own natural rhythms. The Beautiful Beginnings curriculum for infants and toddlers does not overly structure experiences for babies—just the opposite. Our curriculum provides experiences (to be capitalized as Experiences when describing the Experiences that make up this curriculum) that are to be fitted to very young children’s natural rhythms. This curriculum is designed to be individualized to meet the needs of each child in a child care center, home visiting program, teen parenting program, other parenting education program, or home. The Experiences in Beautiful Beginnings are designed to build on each child’s strengths and naturally emerging competencies and interests. But the curriculum can also be used as a safety net for children who may require extra enrichment. For example, some programs may use Beautiful Beginnings in conjunction with a screening system such as the Ages & Stages Questionnaires®(ASQ; Bricker & Squires, 1999) to ensure that children who are vulnerable receive needed developmental experiences.

The Beautiful Beginnings curriculum features six modules (one for each 6–month period from birth to age 3) that include developmentally appropriate activities (Experiences) organized by areas of development (Communication, Gross Motor, Fine Motor, Intellectual, Discovery, and Social for all children, and, for infants and toddlers 6 months and older, the addition of Self-Help and then Pretend at 18 months). These Experiences are easy and inexpensive to administer and may be carried out by caregivers, home visitors, or parents. They are generally grouped according to children’s ages but are not designed to be followed rigidly. Rather, they provide a “menu†of ideas, generally corresponding to developmental sequences. Each child is unique in his development, so Experiences may be selected across age spans as well as within.

Expanding on Our Curriculum

Let us return to the three reasons we stated earlier for an infant–toddler curriculum: to enrich infants’ and toddlers’ experiences, to support early development in all areas,...