The Curriculum

"The Creative Curriculum"

The Tuskegee-Macon County Head Start Program uses "The Creative Curriculum" (Dodge and Colker) as a framework to help young children develop basic skills, concepts, knowledge, and attitudes in the important areas of intellectual development, social behavior, emotional balance and physical skills. A developmentally appropriate educational program for our children is composed of both concrete and abstract experiences that provide knowledge of themselves and the world around them. The curriculum is flexible, and child-centered; it is designed to be a part of the total educational continuum. The Creative Curriculum is inclusive of the Head Start Child Outcome Framework. Additional resources such as: The National Head Start S. T. E. P. (The University of Texas), "The Complete Resource Book-An Early Childhood Curriculum" (Schiller and Hasting) and "The Complete Daily Curriculum for Early Childhood" by Pam Schiller and Pat Thipps, are used to enhance this curriculum.

In an effort to upgrade the quality of services provided by Head Start programs nationwide, the United States Congress has mandated that a child leaving Head Start and entering Kindergarten must be able to:

• Understand an increasingly complex and varied vocabulary
• Develop abilities to understand and use language to communicate effectively
• For non-English speaking children to progress in listening to and understanding English
• Develop phonological awareness
• Associate sounds with written words
• Develop print awareness and concepts
• Recognize words as a unit of print
• Identify at least 10 letters of the alphabet
• Know that letter of the alphabet are a special category of visual graphics that can be individually named
• Identify numbers and operations