About Developmentally Appropriate Programs For Children

Children develop essential skills for academic success during their early childhood years, before the age of eight. A developmentally appropriate preschool or early elementary program that fosters these skills can give students an advantage in later years. The skills children learn -- or fail to learn -- in early childhood can have a serious impact on their later performance.

Defining Developmentally Appropriate

A developmentally appropriate program, or DAP, should be based on three major sources of knowledge about children. First, it should reflect research describing the skills children are usually working on at a given age. Second, it should accommodate the needs and backgrounds of individual children. Third, a program should be based on the cultural and social backgrounds of its students. When enrolling in a DAP, students and families should expect to be asked questions about the child's developmental history and her family background. These help the teachers better understand the child and how to teach him.

What Should A Program Address?

A developmentally appropriate program should focus on physical, social and emotional development, as well as cognitive skills. In young children, these areas are interrelated and cannot be isolated. A lot of the work done in a preschool classroom is physical and interactive. It looks like play to the casual observer, but in a well-designed classroom, children are learning about themselves, their peers. Look for a program that incorporates songs and games with academic content, such as colors, days of the week, and literacy skills.

Developmentally Inappropriate Programs

Children in preschool learn better from hands-on experiences than from teacher-directed, rigidly structured lessons. Preschoolers are learning academic skills in the context of their play-based experiences, but they are not successful in learning isolated skills from the more abstract materials favored in elementary school.

Preparing a Program

Developmentally appropriate programs have clear goals, effective curriculum, ongoing assessment and trained staff. A classroom should be filled with materials that are welcoming and interesting to students and that relate to the curriculum being taught. The curriculum taught should be based on state standards or the overall goals of the program. Students should be assessed to see if they are learning, either through checklists of skills, narrative observations or through written or oral tests. Ask how students are assessed or monitored in the program. It is important that teachers in a DAP have good training, so ask what the school looks for in teachers or how they are trained after they are hired.