Young Wonders provides child-centered, active, learning environments where children learn by doing. Our curriculum is designed to follow the INTENTIONAL TEACHING model from NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children).  An intentional teacher acts with knowledge and purpose to ensure that young children acquire the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in school and in life.  To be “intentional” is to act purposefully, with a goal in mind and a plan for accomplishing it.  Thus an intentional teacher aims at clearly defined learning objectives for children, employs instructional strategies likely to help children achieve the objectives, and continually assesses progress and adjusts the strategies based on that assessment. Intentional teachers use their knowledge, judgment, and expertise to organize learning experiences for children; and when an unexpected situation arises, they can recognize a teaching opportunity and are able to take advantage of it too.  Intentional teaching requires wide-ranging knowledge about how children typically develop and learn.  Teachers must have a repertoire of instructional strategies and know when to use a given strategy to accommodate the different ways that individual children learn and the specific content they are learning.  Intentional teaching combines both child-guided and adult-guided experiences.  Children have significant, active roles in adult-guided experiences, and adults play intentional roles in child-guided experiences, taking advantage of both planned and unexpected learning opportunities. 

teamwork

Team work and imagination are truly represented in this colorful masterpiece. Two four year old children combined their vision and talent to create this amazing picture. When doing some investigating, we discovered there were two very different ideas being represented. One child’s vision included a zoo with a horse. When we asked the other child about her contribution, we found her vision included dots and a rollercoaster. Well, a “Zoo” and a “Rollercoaster” really seem to complement each other!!