Inclusive education is the key to children’s learning! You might have heard about this but does your daycare provide an inclusive learning environment in its classrooms?
The main goal of every daycare should be the creation of a fully inclusive learning environment, and support and promote a flexible education model adapted to the needs and characteristics of each child.
Let's delve a little more into inclusive education, and how you can create an inclusive learning environment in your daycare!
What is Inclusive Education?
UNESCO defines inclusion as making every learner’s access to equal participation in the learning process regardless of their culture and community, identifying their diverse needs, responding to them accordingly, and reducing exclusion in education.”
Therefore, an educational center or inclusive school has to adapt to the learning pace of each child based on their characteristics, interests, needs, and abilities. And never the other way around! It is not the children who have to adapt to the educational system but the educational system to the children.
Obstacles to Inclusive Education
Achieving an inclusive learning environment is not easy and requires changing many aspects. These are some of the obstacles that we encounter daily in many schools:
· Wrong beliefs make it difficult to include people with different abilities.
· Daycare professionals have a lack of resources to respond to the diversity that may exist in the classroom.
· The lack of funding can affect daycares to acquire the necessary material to promote the development of children.
· Physical barriers hinder the full participation of students on a day-to-day basis.
· Excessively rigid study plans in which the real diversity of the students is not taken into account.
How to Create an Inclusive Learning Environment in Your Daycare
To do this, you can implement a series of actions to build adequate inclusive learning environments:
· Interact with the kids to know their needs: their strengths, their interests, needs, and aspects to improve. This takes time, dedication, and continuous observation in the classroom and outside.
· Use active methodologies that allow all children to explore and participate to the same extent. For this, you can use the Whole Year Infant/Toddler Curriculum or Preschool Curriculum or select from a wide range of other curriculums and lesson plans that work well with children of different ages and will help your daycare teachers to take the right approach.
· Propose motivating activities that encourage the manipulation of objects and experimentation with different textures and thicknesses (both on the floor and the table). Indeed, fun and engaging activities not just develop children's interest in the classroom but also enhance their learning skills.
· Give freedom in the classroom: Let the little ones decide what to play and how. Let them explore things, exposing them to new objects to develop discovery-driven learning in children.
· Offer activities that are a fair challenge, not too easy, and not too difficult.
· Evaluate the evolution individually: This will be easier if all of the above has been achieved. If the activities are accessible to all, participation will also be, and the evolution will be observed more clearly and quickly. As each child is different, the way of evaluating should also be.
Quality of Learning vs. Amount of Learning—Slow Education
Everything stated in the previous section is achieved through a different education. Slow education does not intend to do things slowly, but to find the time each child needs for each new learning.
Educating for slowness means respecting the rhythm of each child and the time of each learning. It's not about learning more, but about learning better. It’s about giving them time to prepare, and make learning easier from them.
Another goal of inclusive education is that all children, regardless of their physical, genetic, and social characteristics, have successful access, learning, and participation in the educational field.
We must not forget that the childhood stage, although it is an age in which schooling is not compulsory, is the most important for our children. It is a stage in which the foundations are laid to form their "adult self".
If from a very young age they learn values such as respect for difference, tolerance, friendship, and empathy, situations such as bullying and exclusion can be prevented or eliminated when they reach later stages of their lives.
At Standout Daycare, we believe in inclusive education. To learn strategies and methodologies to make your daycare an inclusive institution, and state-of-the-art training from thriving daycare providers, join the Standout membership.
To learn more about our services, contact Standout Daycare.
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