Relationships & Community (3 - 5 years)

Learning Guidelines

Massachusetts Guidelines for Preschool Learning Experiences

The Relationships and Communities workshop has been designed to meet the Massachusetts Early Learning Guidelines for Preschool Learning Experiences. The purpose of these guidelines, developed by the Massachusetts Association for the Education of Young Children for the Department of Early Education and Care (EEC) in 2003, is to provide a comprehensive view of the development of preschool aged children while documenting the experiences that support this development and school readiness. The guidelines are for families as well as early education and care professionals.

For more information about the guidelines, including definitions of terms, visit http://www.mass.gov/edu/birth-grade-12/early-education-and-care/curriculum-and-learning/

This workshop aligns with the following guidelines:

Learning in English Language Arts

Children will be able to:

• Participate actively in discussions, listen to the ideas of others, and ask and answer relevant questions.
• Communicate personal experiences or interests.
• Listen to and use formal and informal language.
• Use their own words or illustrations to describe their experiences, tell imaginative stories, or communicate information about a topic of interest.
• Generate questions and gather information to answer their questions in various ways.

Learning in Mathematics

Children will be able to:

• Explore and describe a wide variety of concrete objects by their attributes.
• Listen to and say the names of numbers in meaningful contexts.
• Use concrete objects to solve simple addition and subtraction problems using comparative language (more than, fewer than, same number of).
• Organize and draw conclusions from facts they have collected.

Learning in Science and Technology/Engineering

Children will be able to:

• Ask and seek out answers to questions about objects and events with the assistance of interested adults.
• Record observations and share ideas through simple forms of representation such as drawings.
• Explore and describe a wide variety of natural and man-made materials through sensory experiences.
• Explore sunlight and shadows and describe the effects of the sun or sunlight.
• Observe and identify the needs and characteristics of living things: humans, animals, and plants.

Learning in History and Social Science

Children will be able to:

• Identify and describe cause and effect as they relate to personal experiences and age-appropriate stories.
• Discuss examples of rules, fairness, personal responsibilities, and authority in their own experiences and in stories read to them.
• Discuss roles and responsibilities of family or community members who promote the welfare and safety of children and adults.
• Observe and discuss the various kinds of work people do outside and inside their homes.

Learning in Health Education

Children will be able to:

• Recognize and describe or represent emotions such as happiness, surprise, anger, fear, sadness.
• Talk about ways to solve or prevent problems and discuss situations that illustrate that actions have consequences.
• Talk about how people can be helpful/hurtful to one another.
• Describe members of their family and discuss what parents do for their children to keep them safe and healthy.

Talk about some basic ways they can keep their environment clean or take care of it.