A Nurturing Environment for Your Baby to Learn & Grow
Infancy is a time of rapid and amazing growth. At Day Early Learning we believe that being responsive and sensitive helps infants establish a warm relationship with their child care teacher. These strong relationships build the foundation for learning and encourages infants to be curious about and explore their environment.
Curriculum
Day Early Learning classrooms are focused on guiding growth and development in a child-centered environment. We honor a child’s play while providing robust experiences that foster curiosity, bring out self expression, build collaboration and flexible thinking. We select curricula and tools that support our approach to teaching and learning and are aligned with Indiana’s Early Learning Foundations. Our infant classrooms use The Creative Curriculum as their core tool.
Your child’s teacher will establish a weekly lesson plan that targets their individual interests and developmental level.
To help develop language skills, teachers:
• Provide infants with floor time to explore their environment, watch others and grasp toys.
• Encourage infants to roll over, sit up or crawl towards people or toys.
• Provide opportunities for infants to begin to learn to feed themselves.
• Engage with infants during tummy time.
To introduce early math concepts, teachers:
• Provide items for infants to explore different textures, shapes, sizes and colors.
• Help infants distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar adults.
• Read stories and sing songs that include counting and numbers.
• Provide small tunnels or boxes for infants to crawl through.
• Establish daily routines.
To introduce science concepts, teachers:
• Provide toys for infants to grasp and mouth.
• Play peekaboo with infants.
• Encourage infants to push buttons on a pop-up toy.
• Spend time outdoors with infants to teach them about the sights and sounds they see in nature, allowing them to explore and react to outdoor surfaces and changes in weather.
• Create opportunities for infants to observe and experience their environment, both inside and out, using all five senses.
• Provide experiences and toys that foster the understanding of cause and effect.
Simple but powerful interactions boost an infant’s brain development and makes them feel safe and secure in our care.
To establish strong social-emotional skills, teachers:
• Respond to an infant’s smiles, coos, babbles and cries.
• Hold, sit or lie on the floor with infants to be close to them during playtimes.
• Acknowledge infants’ emotions by using words such as, “I see you smiling. Smiles mean you’re happy.”
• Create opportunities for infants to observe and interact with other infants in the environment.
To boost an infant’s physical growth, teachers:
• Provide infants with floor time to explore their environment, watch others and grasp toys.
• Encourage infants to roll over, sit up or crawl towards people or toys.
• Provide opportunities for infants to begin to learn to feed themselves.
• Engage with infants during tummy time
Learning Environments
Our infant classroom environments are developed with the safety and developmental needs of the children in mind. You will see a variety of different learning materials that encourage exploration and support the development and mastery of new skills. Balls, blocks, instruments, shape sorters, sensory bottles, books and more stimulate your child’s learning.
When your child attends Day Early Learning, each day includes experiences that foster creative expression, cognitive development, social and emotional growth, motor skills and problem-solving skills.
Your Child's Teacher
The foundation to a child’s lifelong love of learning begins with a nurturing relationship with their teachers. Infant teachers are trained in responsive caregiving and focus on building a trusting relationship with each child, providing individualized care and developing partnerships with families.
Day Early Learning teachers are education professionals with either an associate or bachelor’s degree in early childhood education or a related field or a Child Development Associate (CDA) credential. Because lifelong learning is central to our work, teachers continue their education through regular trainings. Additionally, Day Early Learning Quality Coaches work with each teacher to enhance their teaching skills. All teachers undergo a screening and background check prior to employment.
Assessing Development
At Day Early Learning, we believe in the importance of regularly assessing each child’s growth and development in order to tailor our lessons and activities to the needs of each individual child. All Day Early Learning centers use several methods to assess each child’s growth and development including:
Each week, you will receive written observations of your child’s development on LifeCubby. These observations are used to help teachers create meaningful lesson plans that will ignite curiosity in your child and help us monitor your child’s growth and learning on a daily basis.
When parents enroll in our program and each time your child transitions to a new classroom, teachers and parents complete the Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ). This tool allows us to help you track your child’s progress in language, problem-solving, fine and gross motor and social-emotional development. It also helps us ensure the right materials and supports are being used to help your child reach the next stage of their development.
In addition to measuring children’s growth, our learning environments and teaching staff are regularly assessed using classroom observation tools to ensure the highest level of teacher-child interactions. This is important because high-quality environments and teacher-child interactions encourage and promote children’s language, math, vocabulary and social skills.