Curriculum

The World at Their Fingertips

About the World
The World at Their Fingertips Education for Bright Horizons empowers children to become confident, successful, lifelong learners and secure, caring people. We help children see the world as an invitation to learn, grow, and live fully by seeing possibilities within their reach. We help children approach school and academics with skills, confidence and a drive to succeed.

Active Learners
Children are active learners who learn best from activities they plan and carry out themselves. They are little scientists and builders, acrobats and artisans who need active experience with the world of people and things. They need opportunities to set goals, plan, reflect, and take responsibility. From birth, they are communicators who need a world filled with books, language experiences, and great conversation.

Teachers are Mentors
Teachers at Bright Horizons Family Solutions are members of the Bright Horizons Team who provide the environment and experiences from which children learn. They create experiences appropriate for each child, ask stimulating questions, provide challenges, and help children find new answers and new opportunities. Teaching also involves helping children achieve the confidence and self-discipline to increasingly develop more sophisticated social and intellectual skills and knowledge that will prepare them for success in school.

Appropriate Learning Environments
The World at Their Fingertips Program for Learning creates developmental, cultural, and individually appropriate learning environments in which each child discovers what the world is like, how it works, what he/she is capable of, and his/her place in it. The daily schedules, learning centers, and the way learning is incorporated into homebase furnishings and the playground are all carefully planned to allow children to independently explore, discover, and learn in preparation for academic success.

The routines and environment are organized to teach: labeled shelves use colors, symbols, and language; science experiences are built into the playground; and language and numbers are built into meals and clean-up. Teachers prepare and rotate the learning centers and provide large and small group experiences, extended projects, and field trips to enrich children's learning. Themes and directions emerge from the interests and experiences of the children, families, and teachers.

Documentation and Assessment
Documentation of learning experiences and child assessment are critical program requirements of The World at Their Fingertips. Teachers and children document homebase experiences, projects, and field trips using journals, documentation panels and other means of public display.

Individualized child observation and assessment are important features guiding parent/teacher/child goal-setting. Assessment characterizes a child's strengths and achievements and notes areas for growth. Each child develops a portfolio of accomplishments.

Parents are Full Partners
At Children's Center at Milton Academy, parents are full partners in every aspect of curriculum: helping to set goals and priorities, planning and evaluating, and sustaining the learning through coordinated experiences at home. We call this The World at Home.

World Foundations
The World at Their Fingertips is based on a rich tradition of early childhood education theory and practice. The developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Eric Erickson, and Howard Gardner have provided the fundamental beliefs underlying the World. The World at Their Fingertips also draws on the work of Peter Salovey and others developing the concept of emotional intelligence, popularized by Daniel Goleman. Robert Coles, author of The Moral Intelligence of Children and numerous other studies on child development, is also a major influence. The key understandings are as follows:

• Children are active learners who construct meaning.
• Intelligence is not a single, unified, cognitive construct.
• Language plays a critical role in development because it is our primary avenue of communication and mental contact with others.
• Based on the development of the brain, there are optimum periods for learning, particularly for developing a facility for language and second language acquisitions. A rich language environment is essential in the first five years of life.
• The primary vehicles for child learning are active exploration and discovery chosen by the child, interaction with children and adults, and opportunity for reflection on experience.
• A teacher's job is to provide the most educationally appropriate environment and to plan for and recognize the learnable moment.

Preparation for Academic Excellence
Children come to us with the wonder, desire, and will to learn. Our job is to make sure they leave Children's Center at Milton Academy with their inquisitive natures intact and the discipline and tools to succeed. Children need to enter school with the skills and desire to think for themselves, solve problems, work with others, communicate, and gain an increasing understanding of the world and how it works.

• Every child needs to be ready to read, armed with the desire, the vocabulary, and the language-deciphering skills they have learned through meaningful experiences.
• Every child needs to approach the world with wonder, knowledge and skills that lead to success in math and science: a growing interest in the properties of things and the relationships and forces that exist in the natural world.
• Every child needs the social skills to perform in a school classroom, whether that classroom is developmentally appropriate or not: listening skills, self-discipline, patience, discipline to the task, the ability to work with others, and the ability to solve problems.

The Structure of World
The World comes to children through:

• High expectations for all children that are clearly outlined to parents and developed through a parent-teacher partnership
• A carefully planned learning environment that is organized for child choice, discovery, exploration, challenge and mastery of emerging skills
• Planned daily activities and projects that reflect the children's emerging interests and skills
• Teachers guiding the exploration by mentoring children, recognizing the learnable moments, and providing encouragement and appropriate challenges
• Planned enrichment activities that take advantage of local resources
• A team approach: curriculum and the child's educational experience are products of the entire Bright Horizons team, including national, regional, center and homebase leadership
• Documenting the child's and the group's experiences while communicating to parents
• Setting individual goals and planning with parents for each child
• Partnering with parents to evaluate and plan the child's experience
• Fun, voluntary, parent-child learning activities that extend the homebase curriculum

The World at Their Fingertips Program for Learning is both an approach and a sensibility that infuses interactions and the planned environment. Individual elements such as Language Works, Math Counts, Science Rocks, Projections, Our World, ArtSmart and The World at Home are integrated into each of the developmental programs' environments and into the "sensibility of the center," rather than isolated in artificial, discrete components.

A Final Note
Children's Center at Milton Academy, partnered with Bright Horizons, recognizes the unique strengths of each child and uses those strengths to help the child meet high expectations. We are committed to helping children develop the information-gathering and problem-solving tools to succeed in school. Children will learn to use their minds, books, computers, scientific instruments, and the people in their lives to seize the opportunities that life presents.