C309 Range of experiences

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Criterion C309 Guidance

Criterion C309

The service curriculum provides children with a range of experiences and opportunities to enhance and extend their learning and development – individually and in groups.

Curriculum criteria documentation required

Guidance

The range of experiences and opportunities provided to enhance children’s learning and development will be heavily influenced by the outcomes of assessment, planning, and evaluation practices. Along with providing a range of resources and equipment, extending children’s learning and development involves using these in purposeful and meaningful ways, relevant to the children’s lives.

Resources take many forms and will include people, places and things. The resources provided to support the service curriculum should reflect the service’s philosophy of learning and will be responsive to the preferences of children, their families, the staff, and community. In a hospital setting resources may be provided in a shared activity area for those children whose health allows it. Curriculum experiences for children who are unable to access this space will need to be flexible to enable participation.

The experiences and opportunities available should:

enable children to make choices about their learning
take the form of individual or group learning
happen in different environments and
offer challenge and familiarity.

Through their interactions with children, educators have a key role in extending children’s learning and development. They create opportunities for children to expand their thinking and learning within friendly, nurturing relationships.

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Practice

Examples of what this might look like in practice:

Educators are familiar with individual children’s interests and strengths and provide appropriate experiences to extend them.
Children have appropriate access to varied environments that they can explore and investigate.
Equipment can be used in a variety of different ways.
Children are actively engaged in investigation and sustained exploration.
The service curriculum reflects the holistic way that children learn.
Educators frequently join in children’s activities, offer materials, information or encouragement to facilitate play and learning around a particular subject.

Things to consider

Are there enough resources to promote children’s choices for challenge, revisiting, exploration, solitary and group play?
How is our environment set up? Who makes the decisions about how our environment is set up? Where does assessment for learning figure in this?
How are children and their whānau | families engaged with regarding the range of experiences and opportunities provided?
How do our teaching practices stimulate children’s thinking, and reflect the holistic way children learn and grow?
Is our environment used in purposeful and meaningful ways?
Is the environment arranged in a way that allows choice and opportunities for independence and interdependence?