EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM
The educational services offered by childcare centres are based on the application of the Ministère de la Famille’s educational program. The educational program is applied in childcare centres in Québec. Let’s have a look at its main characteristics.
Goals of educational childcare centres:
- Welcoming children and meeting their needs
- Ensuring children’s well-being, safety and health
- Favouring equal opportunities
- Contributing to children’s socialisation
- Providing support for parents
- Facilitating children’s entry in school
Goals of the educational program:
- Ensuring quality services for children
- Serving as a reference tool for anyone working in the childcare-centre environment
- Promoting coherence between childcare environments
- Favouring the anchoring of all interventions regarding early childhood and families with young children
Its principles:
All children are unique beings, and educational activities must respect their own rhythm of development and individual needs.
Child development is a global and harmonious process taking into account children’s abilities and all dimensions of their being.
Children are the primary agents of their own development: they build their knowledge of themselves, of others and of their environment.
Children learn through play, which is the primary activity at the childcare centre and the basis of educational interventions.
Collaboration between the educational staff and parents is essential and contributes to children’s harmonious development.
The program’s theoretical foundations:
Ecological approach or the importance of interactions between the child and his environment:
Children build and develop themselves through interactions with their physical and human environment. This interaction must thus be taken into account in all aspects of childcare services, from space planning to activity structure, including the quality of adult-child, child-child and adult-parent interactions.
Attachment theory or the importance of establishing a significant adult-child relationship:
The quality of the relationship established between infants, and later children, and the first adults who care for them constitutes the cornerstone of children’s development. Stable relationships that make children feel secure foster their trust and their motivation for exploring the world around them, In the context of childcare services, the educational staff and home childcare providers must thus create conditions that are favourable to the creation of a meaningful affective bond with the child.
The spheres of child development:
Affective dimension: Satisfying children’s affective needs is just as vital as satisfying their physical needs. That’s why it’s crucial to create a stable, comforting affective relationship with children as soon as they enter the childcare service, because this relationship will be the base from which they can develop in harmony.
Physical and motor dimension: This refers to the physiological, physical, sensorial, and motor needs of children. Developing motor skills (agility, endurance, balance, lateralization, etc.) includes gross motor skills (sitting, crawling, walking, running, climbing, grabbing an object, etc.) and fine motor skills (drawing, stringing pearls, cutting paper, etc.). Allowing children to move about in childcare services favours their physical and motor development while leading them to acquire healthy living habits and preventing obesity.
Social and moral dimension: The childcare environment provides children with an opportunity to enter into relationships with others, to express and control their emotions, to put themselves in another’s place, and to solve problems. The acquisition of social skills and the emergence of awareness about right and wrong allow children to maintain more-and-more harmonious relationships and to take others’ perspective into account before they act.
Cognitive dimension: A stimulating living environment allows children to develop their senses, to acquire new knowledge and abilities and to better understand the world around them. The educational staff and home childcare providers support children in this respect by favouring reflection, reasoning and creativity.
Language dimension: Language and symbolic-representation development is reinforced by group living. Childcare-service staff contributes to the development of children in this respect by speaking with them and helping them express better and better their needs and emotions, ask questions, and improve their elocution and vocabulary.
