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The Child Development Center has adopted the High/Scope educational approach for working with young children. This approach is very much child centered based on Jean Piaget’s constructivist theory of child development blended with the best teaching practices.
What Is High/Scope?
High/Scope is an “active learning” educational approach in which children are mentally and physically active. Children use their whole bodies and all their senses to explore and learn about their world. It views play as children’s work – a time when children are planning, testing, questioning, and experimenting to construct their own knowledge about people, objects, events, and ideas.
High/Scope is consistent with the best practices recommended by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), Head Start Performance Standards, and other guidelines for developmentally based programs. High/Scope, however, has unique features that are different from other early childhood programs. These include
- A daily “plan-do-review” sequence (Research shows that the planning and reviewing are the two components of the program day most positively and significantly associated with children’s scores on measures of developmental progress.)
- The second feature is the High/Scope key experiences. These are the social, intellectual, and physical experiences that are essential to young children’s optimal growth.
The High/Scope Key Experiences
Infant/Toddler Key Experiences
(birth through 2 ½ years old) |
Preschool Key Experiences
(2 ½ through 5 years old) |
- Sense of Self
- Social Relations
- Creative Representation
- Movement and Music
- Communication and Language
- Exploring Objects
- Early Quantity and Number
- Space and Time
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- Creative Representation
- Language and Literacy
- Initiative and Social Relations
- Music and Movement
- Classification and Seriation Number
- Space and Time
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The Benefits of High/Scope Approach
- Help children become independent, responsible and confident
- Give children and adults opportunity to invent and discover together as they explore materials and ideas and experience events
- Minimize adult-child conflicts
- Maintain children’s interest by allowing them to do what is important to them
- Give children the opportunity to develop skills in which to take care of their own needs and solve problems
- Help child develop executive skills (self control)
- Help children gain knowledge and skills in content areas such as creative representation, language and literacy, initiative and social relations, movement and music, classification and seriation, number, space and time
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