Emergent Curriculum At Home

In an early childhood classroom, observation is one of the most powerful tools a teacher can utilize to create activities for their students. Observation of a child’s interests, how they manipulate materials and tools, what they say - both verbally and non-verbally - and how they move around the space are all essential ways in which we scaffold and challenge our students. This is called emergent curriculum, and is heavily influenced by the Reggio Emilia method of teaching. At its core, emergent curriculum means we design learning experiences that are not teacher-driven, but rather informed by the interests, abilities, and passions arising in the students at the given moment. Teachers are trained to layer developmentally-appropriate milestone work with these child-centric ideas as a way to increase investment in their students and enrich the learning.

For example, imagine a nursery classroom where students are interested in dinosaurs. For the classroom’s family and community-focused social emotional curriculum, a teacher could tailor their lesson to discuss dinosaur families. The math curriculum, meanwhile, might deal with building patterns using dinosaur counters; the dramatic play center may turn into a scientific laboratory, museum, or even a prehistoric setting. Responding to students’ interests creates variety between classrooms — refrigerator-box-spaceships and astronaut math in one classroom, and a make-believe airport lounge and pilot-focused read-alouds in another.

But how do we scale this sort of teaching from a classroom to an at-home learning environment?

A practical guide to emergent curriculum at home:

1. Identify the child’s interests: To identify an interest that can be harnessed to build an emergent provocation, begin with deep observation of your child at work. Document this so that you can reflect on it later. When you are eating a snack with your student, what topic comes up most frequently? When the child is making marks in their journal, do the entries have a common theme? As you are building with blocks, what games does the child want to play in their structures? Is there a trend in the books that you’ve been reading? If you are documenting your days through pictures, art projects, and audio and video recordings, you can begin to search for patterns.

2. Incorporate provocation into learning: Now that you have identified a theme that sparks interest in your child, it is time to do the fun part: adapting that interest to their learning. Think about ways that you can adjust simple things first. What would a dramatic play center look like if we let the child take control of its direction? For a child interested in trains, you might look for artifacts that could be elements of a train station or a subway car. Can the block center, or free-building play, be more related to the emergent curriculum? Perhaps the child could build a train track and tunnel from recycled materials. How can the art studio support your theme as well? A portrait of a conductor, perhaps or drawing tracks? As you grow more comfortable with these adjustments, it becomes easier to adapt the other parts of daily learning such as math and literacy in this interdisciplinary fashion.

3. Document and celebrate success: Sharing student work is oftentimes a given, but with emergent curriculum it is even more impactful than just celebrating an accomplishment. When you share work that has been generated through a child’s interests, you allow for a deeper opportunity to connect interest, effort and knowledge and stimulate both memory and intrinsic motivation. Additionally, because the curriculum has been tailored to suit that particular child, the student may find it easier to make connections between different areas of study. Being excited about the process of learning means that the student can reflect on their education in a meaningful way.

4. Access joy: Most importantly, emergent curriculum should be fun. Start slow to gauge interest by reading a few books with the specific focus in which the child is interested. How long a topic remains the right choice in the creation of your provocations is up to the child. Just as you used observation and documentation to determine what new way to shift your teaching at home, make sure you’re using the same method to decide when to wrap up your work. Some interests may fade quickly in just a few days while others may be a topic of discussion for weeks – or even months – on end. Above all, make sure that you are all having fun and enjoying new experiences together.

Adjusting activities to be better suited to your child is a great way to help them connect with new ideas. Emergent curriculum doesn’t need to take over every aspect of your teaching, but using it as a through line across activities over a longer period of time can be powerful for young learners, as it brings together diverse activities in a comprehensive manner. This, in turn, enables students to develop more meaningful understandings through interdisciplinary associations.