The teacher plays a key role in facilitating learning through carefully planned instruction, curriculum design, and organizing learning activities. They consider students' developmental needs and arrange the classroom into centers to support self-directed learning. Play is essential to children's learning and development, and the daily schedule provides a balance of teacher-directed and child-initiated activities both indoors and outdoors. Developmental-thematic curriculum engages students through integrated learning based on selected themes, with activities chosen or planned by both teachers and students.

1. The Teacher’s Role
• The teacher’s role is to use the environment and
teaching activities to facilitate learning.
• The teacher has a major role in planning and
implementing instruction.
• The teacher is a designer of curriculum.
• The teacher organize learning activities for
children.
• Teacher design activities that will comprise both
teacher-guided lessons and child-centered and
selected activities.

2. • Hohman, Banet, and Weikart (1979) describ
progressions that explain active reconstruction
of knowledge.

3. Three Progressions
1. Concrete to Abstract
2. Simple to Complex
3. Experiencing to Representing

4. The Role of the Environment
The preschool classroom is arranged into learning or
activity centers or areas.
Learning areas should allow the children to be able
to make choices and carry them out.
The materials in each area are organized to support
the curriculum; therefore, the child-initiated
activities that are possible in each learning center
facilitate self-directed learning and independence.

5. Ways to arrange the classroom into centers or areas
• Dramatic Play Center
• Language Center
• Science and Mathematics Center
• Art Center
• Music and Movement Center

6. Room arrangement is Fluid and modifiable.
Some areas may be expandable and others
reduce or eliminated for a time.

7. The Role of Play
• Is one of the most difficult aspects of young
children’s development and learning for many
educators and parents to understand.
• Play is something perceived as idleness or useless
activity when contrasted with learning.
• Play provides opportunities for active for active
exploration of information, social interactions,
and physical activity essential to learning and
development.

8. Various types of Play in the Development of
Children
• Cognitive development, sociodramatic play
and construction play.
• Relationship between creativity and play.
• Development of Language
• Social development
• Physical development
• Provides Experiences

9. The Role of the Daily Schedule
• Provides opportunities for children to plan and
carry out projects and other learning and play
activities, for the teacher to conduct small-group
and whole-group activities, and for groups to
enjoy both indoor and outdoor activities.
• When planning the daily schedule the teacher will
want to achieve a balance between teacher-directed
and child-directed or child-initiated
activities.

10. Schedule Components
• Large-group time
• Center time
• Small-group time
• Outdoor time

11. Planning and Managing
Instruction

12. How does the teacher plan and implement?
• We want to explore how the classroom teacher
designs and implements developmentally
appropriate curriculum for preschool students.
• Teachers not only must consider the general
developmental characteristics of their student
as a group, but they must also consider the
unique qualities of each individual student.

13. • Teachers analyze the diversity represented among
their students in terms of cultural and economic
backgrounds, as well as in terms of individual
differences in interests and abilities.
There are many available resources for
determining goals and objectives for curriculum
in early childhood classrooms. Some source of
curriculum include
– Developmental checklist
– State mandated curriculum objectives
– Commercial curriculum objectives related to adopted
basal material
– Locally determined curriculum goals

14. Planning and managing curriculum to achieve
the desired goal can take various forms. If the
program is to developmentally appropriate, the
curriculum design must facilitate successful
learning that accommodates developmental
differences within a child-centered or child-initiated
approach.

15. Understanding Developmental-
Thematic Curriculum

16. Back Ground…
• John Dewey introduce thematic curriculum with
his project approach during the Progressive Era.
• Themes were used for meaningful projects that
Dewey believed would engage children in
learning for a purpose.
• Later, Dewey lamented that project approach had
been reduced to a collection of activities rather
than useful experiences that would have a real
purpose for the child’s understanding.

17. • He describe the contrast between, on the hand,
aimless utilization of activities collected by
teacher and, on the other hand, working with the
problems that emerged from the children’s
experience and were within their capacity to
understand the relation of means and ends
• Integrated Learning among other variation of
names. The new advocates of this type of
curriculum stress not only the interrelated nature
of learning but also the importance of the child
involvement in planning and implementations of
the themes that are developed.

18. What is thematic curriculum?
• It is a curriculum that is planned around a
theme that the teacher has selected or the
students have identified as a learning topic.
• The learning activities selected for the theme
are reflective of how the students want to
explore the topic or the kinds of activities they
have identified that will help them acquire the
knowledge or skills related to theme.

19. Roles of Developmental-Thematic Curriculum
1. Developmental-Thematic Curriculum as the
Basic Framework.
2. Developmental-Thematic Curriculum as
One of Several Approaches.

20. Designing Developmental-Thematic Curriculum
Units
• Selecting a Theme Topic
• Brainstorming a Topic
• Developing a Brainstorming Web
• Selecting Unit Activities

21. Describing Developmental-Thematic Unit
Objectives.
• Describing Integrated Unit Activities
• Planning Lesson Activities