How children learn here
Play-based and emergent, guided by Flight, the early learning framework used across Alberta. What that means in practice is on this page.
Flight: Alberta's Early Learning and Care Framework
Flight is the province’s curriculum framework for early learning and care. It is not a syllabus and it does not come with worksheets. It describes children as capable, and asks educators to plan around what a child is already trying to work out.
It is worth knowing the name. When you tour other centres, asking which framework they work from tells you quickly whether anyone there has thought about this.
The four things educators watch for
Playing and playfulness
Play is not the reward for finishing the work. It is the work. A child sorting stones by size for forty minutes is doing mathematics, and interrupting that to run a numbers activity would be a downgrade.
Seeking and sense-making
Children arrive with a theory about how something works and test it, usually loudly. Educators are trained to hold back the correct answer long enough for the child to get closer to it themselves.
Participating and belonging
Learning to be one of a group is most of what the early years are for. Negotiating, waiting, joining in, and being missed when you are away.
Caring and fairness
The arguments over who had the bike first are curriculum. We coach through them rather than solving them, because a child who can sort it out at four can sort it out at fourteen.
What parents worry about when they hear play-based
“Play-based means they will not be ready for school”
Kindergarten teachers ask for children who can manage a coat, ask for help, sit with a group and finish something. Worksheets at three do not build any of that. Long uninterrupted play does.
“They should be reading before kindergarten”
Early literacy is oral before it is written: vocabulary, rhyme, story structure, being read to. Children who get that arrive ready. Children drilled on letters without it arrive able to name letters.
“There is no structure”
There is a great deal of structure. The day has a firm rhythm, the room is set up deliberately, and educators plan every week. What is loose is the content, because it follows what the children are actually deep in.
Ask to see a planning sheet on your tour
Any centre can say the words play-based. Ask to see what an educator actually wrote down last week, and what changed because of something a child said. That is the difference between a philosophy and a poster.
Book a tour