GRIT ASaP (Access, Support, and Participation)

BERNITA PIERCE

Grit Facilitator & Coordinator

ASaP has adopted the evidence-based Pyramid Model, developed by the Centre on the Social and Emotional Foundations for Early Learning, as the foundation for its professional learning. ASaP has enriched this learning within our Alberta context to include connections to:

• Flight, Alberta’s early learning and care curriculum framework

• Comprehensive practices for children with diverse abilities

• Awareness of cultural diversity

• Infant and child mental health practices

• Brain development in the early years

The Pyramid Model provides the framework of evidence-based practices for promoting young children’s healthy social and emotional development:

• We provide universal supports for all children through nurturing and responsive relationships and high-quality supportive environments

• Our targeted supports provide intentional teaching to support the social and emotional development for some children

• Working closely with families and educators, we develop an individual support plan and provide intensive supports for a few children

Introduction to Flight

Flight: Alberta’s Early Learning and Care Framework inspires curriculum meaning making that highlights the relationships and curriculum decisions shaping responsive practices in early learning and child care communities. It is a guide for early learning educators to use in their everyday work with young child care frameworks that have been developed in other parts of Canada and around the world.

The Alberta framework recognizes, appreciates, and values:

• The practice of relationships among educators, children and families that make visible the uniqueness of each child care centre and family day home in Alberta

• The co-constructed nature of early learning curriculum: recognizing the unique nature of learning in early childhood, educators make curriculum decisions “in the moment,” extending play and learning through thoughtful reflection and dialogue with children, families, and other educators.

• The search for shared professional language— a language that may cause pause, calling upon us to reflect deeply in order to make the values, principles, and goals that frame practice in early learning and childcare clear to ourselves and visible to others.

An early learning and child care curriculum framework is different that a traditional curriculum. In early childhood, curriculum is focused on broad holistic goals rather that specific outcomes for each subject area. early learning and childcare curriculum frameworks embrace children’s everyday experiences as the source of curriculum meaning making. Early childhood educators use the goals in curriculum frame work to describe and interpret children’s everyday experiences. In early childhood, curriculum content is integrated, emerging from children’s fascination with the world. When educators notice children’s interest in exploring nature, people, places, and objects as well as print, stories, numbers, shapes, and patterns, and when they name the connections between these experienced and early literacy, mathematics, science, social studies, music, and art, they are co-constructing early learning curriculum with young children and making the curriculum visible to others.

(Section 1, Flight: An Introduction, Alberta’s Early Learning and Care Framework)