Before this class, I didn't understand why we needed goals for everything, but after taking it I realized how meaningful you need to be with every single thing you are doing with your class, whether it is just playing freely outside or a specific science activity. When I was coming up with whale activities, I felt overwhelmed at first because the fact I had to stretch the theme of whales over 20 lessons seemed very overwhelming and impossible. However, when I got into it, I realized how much you could really do with one simple theme. .
One example is when I came up with a science project that was about matching the picture of a whale to the name. At first, I thought this was great. I didn't take into consideration that the children that this curriculum was directed towards children who were unable to read. This made me have to reconsider the game. I ended up changing it into a small group activity where I would hold up the name and then say it, and then the children would work together to pick out the picture that matched. This made the learning goals of this project much more meaningful and realistic. They were: to strengthen knowledge on the different types of whales, to improve social emotion skills by having to problem solve as a group, and to begin to connect spoken words to written words. The process of this whole experience in this class gave me much more knowledge about curriculum development and made me much more comfortable to having to work on developing one. .
The toddler room was where I first became a lead teacher. When I entered the room, there was no curriculum. It was just about having the children get through the day safely and having fun. I understand that working with this age group is completely different than working with a preschool class because the children are developmentally at a completely different place. They can't retain the same things that a four year old can.
