The Earth’s closest neighbor is the moon.  Its path around the Earth takes just over twenty seven days to complete.  Mankind has only ever walked on the Earth and the moon.  The moon is important for the Earth because it causes the tides through gravitational forces between the Earth and the moon.  It’s brightness in the night sky attracts many children to learn more about it and the overall subject of astronomy.

Then there’s our sun.  Earth is quite far from the sun.  We are between 91 and 94 million miles from the sun.  That’s because Earth’s orbit around the sun isn’t a circle, it’s an ellipse.  Life on Earth is only possible because of the sun.  The sun provides both light and heat to the planet.  Most people don’t realize that the sun accounts for around 98% of all the mass in the solar system.  What a hog.

Our sun and solar system reside in a galaxy called the Milky Way.  It’s full of space stuff.  But most of the galaxy is empty nothingness.  That’s a lot of nothing because our galaxy is 100,000 light years across and 3,000 light years deep.  Our sun is over 30,000 light years from the center of the galaxy.  The nothingness is broken up by over 100 billion stars.  In fact the galaxy takes its name from the appearance of the band of stars that shine from the main section of the galaxy.  It looks like a pool of liquid, thus the name “Milky Way.”  It’s a spiral galaxy, one of four major types of galaxies in the universe.  The others are elliptical, lenticular and irregular.

Astronomy for kids is well covered online.  From dictionaries and encyclopedic references, to programs that show different planets, solar systems and objects right on the computer, there’s more information than a kid would ever read.

Definition of early childhood education

In order to realize the significance of early childhood education, first we have to know its proper definition. Early childhood education refers to the combination of physical, intelligence/cognitive, emotional, and social learning of a child during the fist six to eight years of her life. While parents and primary care givers play an important role in the child’s acquisition of such knowledge, in a more specialized sense, the early childhood education is offered to the child by a professional early childhood educator. However, a good educator will always involve the parents in his/her early childhood programs to get the maximum benefits from the program.

The basic premise of early childhood education

Advanced psychological researches have concluded that children learn at the fastest pace when they are between 0-6 years of age. Based on this notion, the early child educators design their program that helps boost up the child’s natural learning process. Now, a scientific child development program is not all; it must be accompanied by proper nutrition, parental/caregiver interaction, and stimulus and in the absence of any of these factors, the child is bound to lag behind miserably in the latter course of his/ her life. Thus, side by side of a well chalked out early childhood curse, it is equally important that the children must receive due attention, a respectful treatment and lots of affection from parents or caregivers in the absence of parents.

The designing of the curriculum

There are a number of early childhood education programs that are based on different theories ranging from maturationist theory propounded by Jacques Rousseau and Maria Montessori to behaviorist theory developed by John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner and Edward Thorndike. The current pre school educational scenario is dominated by the ideas and curriculum that incorporate the features of all the leading theories. However all the current pre-school education curriculum has one common characteristic: all of them are designed to cater to the individual needs of a child and all of them aim at developing the self esteem of the child. 

To summarize it all, a good pre-school program will

• Involve the parents or the caregiver in the learning process.
• It should place an emphasis on learning through play.
• The program must place equal importance on the physical, cognitive, emotional and social development of the child.
• In general, the entire learning process must mean fun for the child and not something forceful.