HawksView Gardens uses an emergent curriculum approach.

What is an emergent curriculum?

• While framed by the teacher, it is child initiated, allowing for collaborations between children and teachers, and giving everyone a voice.
• It is responsive to the child, thereby allowing teachers to build upon existing interests.
• In its practice, the teacher takes on the role of facilitator taking what they see and hear and bringing to children the opportunity to discover more, dig deeper, and construct further knowledge.
• It is flexible in that curriculum planning, rather than being done well in advance, is constantly developing. Curriculum is dynamic, neither stagnant or repetitive.
• It enables children’s learning and teachers’ thinking to be made visible through varied forms of documentation.
• An emergent curriculum can be written to include academic components while maintaining a commitment to building instruction based on student interest.
• Differentiation in activity planning is often used.  Differentiation means tailoring instruction to meet an individual’s needs. Differentiation promotes voice and choice in how learning takes place and uses whole-group, small-group, and individual tasks designed around the content to meet the needs of the learners.