Developmently Appropriate Practices Essay

Developmentally Appropriate Practices and the Whole Child

Abstract: Developmentally Appropriate Practices provides a guideline to teachers for structuring classroom activities. The activities which work on the development of the whole child contributes to his/her optimum development as the focus is on child’s age, interests, developmental level and prior experiences. Developmentally Appropriate Practices works on identifying and bridging of gaps in learning and thus ensuring development of the child in an orderly fashion. The classroom practices generally followed in classrooms works on a set of assumptions about the children. Instead these should be planned after observing the present levels of learning of the child. In this article real
Six year old Gaurav who is an autistic child is listening to a story of Caterpillar and butterfly along with his other age mates. Teacher has chosen a big colourful story book with pictures and text. Teacher keeps on taking a quick scan of the response of the children to the story. All the children seem to be participating and enjoying the session. In situations when Gaurav loses interest in the classroom activity he likes to stand by the notice board near the
Teachers must understand that hands-on experience and learning through exploration, self-selected, and independently pursued activities are the best ways in which children learn.
Prerna a first grade teacher believes that activities focusing on all domains of development in line with the interests of each and every child in mind. She intentionally organizes materials and creates situations in classroom to promote overall development of the child. Prerna introduced the concept of rain to her first graders while talking of Monsoon. Her students were curious to know from where the rains come. She divided them in groups and provided materials for making a Mini Water Cycle in the class.
Prerna (teacher)- "All children will work at their allotted workstations and follow the instructions I am giving".
Children stood at their work stations and helped each other in making a small model of Water cycle by filling the transparent jar with water and covering it with a plastic sheet. It was interesting to hear them discuss and allot work to each other.
One of the student, Sanya (to Jitin) – Hold the plastic sheet tightly and I will put the rubber