Quality Rating 5: Planning
Instructions
To meet the requirements for Developmentally Appropriate Learning and Practice: Planning: DAP 4.5 (School-Age Only), your statement should clearly describe the lesson planning process you follow to ensure that your activities:
- Are culturally competent and age-appropriate
- Are based on essential learning domains
- Age 3 – 5: Social Foundations, Language and Literacy, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, Physical Well-being and Motor Development and Fine Arts
- School-Age: Literacy, Language, Science, Art, Health and Wellness, Physical Fitness, and Numeracy
- Reflect the children’s interests and skills
- Address the developmental needs of each and every child
- Are informed by ongoing assessments, observations and information from families
- Include information from a child’s IEP, if provided by the family
The Policy or Statement Builder provides a step-by-step guide for creating your statement.
Lesson Planning Process
Creating environments where all children are respected and thrive requires careful planning and organization, especially since no two children are exactly alike. Your lesson plans and the process you follow to create them demonstrate the time, attention, and care you devote to creating purposeful activities and learning experiences. Your careful planning results in activities across multiple domains that represent and respect the diversity among the children in your program.
What does the documentation look like?
Your statement clearly describes a lesson planning process that includes activities that:
- Are culturally competent
- Match the children’s ages and individual developmental levels, skills, and needs
- Cross multiple developmental and learning domains
- Reflect the children’s interests, background experiences, cultures, and home languages
- Are informed by ongoing assessments, observations and information from families
- Include a child’s IEP, if provided
Activities Informed by a Child’s IEP
Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) provide guidance on ways to meet the needs of individual children with special health care needs or disabilities. Remember you are a critical member of the team who helps put these plans into action. Your lesson planning process is documentation of the steps you take to support individual children and to include a child’s learning goals in your daily activities.
What does the documentation look like?
Your lesson plans and process clearly show ways information from a child’s IEP are part of typical routines and activities. Some examples include:
- Use of specialized equipment (examples: chubby crayons, pencil grips, magnifying lenses, hearing devices)
- Opportunities for a child to practice targeted skills (examples: speech sounds, fine motor skills, independent / self-help skills)
- Opportunities for peer-to-peer interaction (examples: reading a large print book together, free choice activities, outdoor play)
- Adjustments to your plans to accommodate a child’s special health care needs
Policy or Statement Builder
Develop a Lesson Planning Statement that describes your program’s process in developing purposeful activities and meaningful experiences for children. Once you have spent time reflecting on the questions below, you’re ready to build your Lesson Planning Process Statement.
- What is the process used for developing your lesson plans?
- How do you ensure that the lesson plans reflect the children’s interests and skills?
- How do you make sure your lesson plan addresses the developmental needs of each child?
- If an IEP is provided, how is that information incorporated into lesson plans?
- How do you include literacy, language, science, art, health and wellness, physical fitness, and numeracy activities? Provide examples. (Levels 4 & 5)
- How do you address the activities described above on a daily basis? (Level 5)
Once you have spent time reflecting on the questions, you have the option to download and save the Lesson Planning Template and create your statement.
Technology Tips
Download the PDF.
Save the PDF.
Print the PDF.
Edit the PDF.
Do you need more time to think about writing your Lesson Planning Statement? Use Writers Tips and Prompts to find examples and get more guidance.
Where can you learn more?
- School-Age Children in Child Care Children of different ages need different types of care and nurturing. Quality child care programs help children grow in all areas of development: physical, intellectual, social, emotional, language, moral, and spiritual domains. Child care providers need to understand how children of different ages grow and learn in order to provide warm, sensitive care and positive learning experiences.
- Equity in Action: Tips for School–Age Child Care Providers Creating a safe, welcoming space where children learn and thrive, and where families feel supported, is a hallmark of high-quality school-age child care. This resource is designed to build the capacity of school-age child care providers in supporting equity and inclusion.
- Developing Empathy to Build Warm, Inclusive Classrooms Modeling and teaching empathy— concern for others’ feelings—is an important part of being an effective, culturally competent teacher.
- Critical Practices for Anti-bias Education This critical practices guide offers practical strategies for creating a space where academic and social-emotional goals are accomplished side by side. It also provides valuable advice for implementing culturally responsive pedagogy and describes how teachers can bring anti-bias values to life.
- Moving Beyond Anti-Bias Activities: Supporting the Development of Anti-Bias Practices Children’s comments can sometimes fluster both new and experienced teachers—even those who support equity and diversity in schools. While teaching at the Eliot-Pearson Children’s School at Tufts University, this article’s authors explored what it means to embrace an anti-bias stance every day.
- Understanding Anti-Bias Education: Bringing the Four Core Goals to Every Facet of Your Curriculum Anti-bias education is not just doing occasional activities about diversity and fairness topics (although that may be how new anti-bias educators begin). To be effective, anti-bias education works as an underpinning perspective, which permeates everything that happens in an early childhood program—including your interactions with children, families and coworkers—and shapes how you put curriculum together each day.