Education Services

Individualized Learning for Every Child

We recognize that all children and families are unique. This is reflected in the planning for every child. Teachers will use several tools to help families decide what goals children will work towards.

Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ) – Teachers partner with families to screen each child’s overall development. This includes large motor and small motor abilities, speech and language development, and social skills.

Devereux Early Childhood Assessment (DECA) – This is a questionnaire answered by parents to assess social-emotional development

Teaching Strategies Gold (TSG) is an online assessment tool for teachers to track each child’s progress throughout the year. This allows teachers to create individualized experiences for each child. Information in TSG comes from the observations made in the classroom and at home.

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Curriculum

Developmentally appropriate practices guide our work with children, which means teachers get to know children and use their skills to provide activities that are achievable and challenging.

SCCDC uses The Creative Curriculum for Infants, Toddlers and Twos and The Creative Curriculum for Preschool in their center-based classrooms. These provide a framework for teachers to develop lesson plans that enhance the individual skills of children and support school readiness. These research-based curriculums are used to design center-based classroom environments and experiences. Lesson plans are written to enhance children’s skills and support school readiness goals.

The Home-based program uses the Partners for a Healthy Baby Curriculum. Partners for a Healthy Baby is researched based guidance that helps families have a healthy birth outcome and support their child’s developmental needs in the first 3 years.

School Readiness Goals

SCCDC developed School Readiness Goals for children’s progress across 5 learning domains: Social Emotional, Physical Development and Health, Approaches to Learning, Language and Literacy, and Cognitive and General Knowledge. The SCCDC School Readiness goals are aligned with the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework, and, where applicable, the New York State Pre-Kindergarten Foundation for the Common Core.

SCCDC will strive to ensure all children (ages 0-5) will make progress across all Teaching Strategies GOLD objectives and dimensions, with at least 85% at or above widely held expectations for their age.

Social-Emotional Development

  • Children will engage in and sustain positive, pro-social and cooperative relationships with familiar adults.
  • Children will begin to appropriately express, recognize and regulate emotions in themselves and others.

Language and Literacy

  • Children will comprehend, attend to, and respond to increasingly complex communication and language from others.
  • Children will express self-using verbal and non-verbal communication in detailed ways, following appropriate social and conventional rules of language, varying the amount of information based on the situation.
  • Children will begin to demonstrate and understand how print is used through engagement with stories and books.

Physical Development and Health

  • Children will develop control of large muscles for effective exploration, movement, and to demonstrate control and coordination.
  • Children will begin to demonstrate healthy and safe habits in daily routines.

Approaches to Learning

  • Children will begin to manage emotions, actions, words and behaviors to follow classroom rules and routines with increasing independence.

Cognition and General Knowledge

  • Children will begin using everyday math concepts during daily routines and experiences, developing sense of number and quantity, spatial awareness, and classification.
  • Children will use problem-solving and reasoning as they gather information, explore their physical environment, to discover how objects work, ask questions, make predictions, conduct investigations, experiments and analyzes to communicate results.