Educating the Entire Child

Discovery Days and Kids Connection Child Care Centers exist to provide quality early childhood educational programming to children ages 6 weeks to 12 years. The programming, by its nature is “entire child” focused. But what does this actually mean? 

Entire child education is way of viewing education that recognizes that all aspects of their development needed to be tended to  and nurtured. Children deserve programming that is attuned to their physical, emotional, social, cognitive, psychological, and language needs.  It is essential to recognize that children are not defined by their development in one domain, they are the sum of their parts.   

Educational institutions must recognize that every child excels in different developmental areas. Some children are gifted physically with excellent fine motor skills, while others have exceptional emotional agility for their age.  Regardless of what their strengths is, it is important to recognize that every child has one. At Kids Connection and Discovery Days, we believe that programming must reach every developmental domain, and be enjoyable for it to be productive. 

Educating the entire child focuses on building the strengths of each individual child, while also providing additional support where it is needed. For example, our programming provides additional assistance for children who struggle with speech at a young age by ensuring that additional time is spent working with the child on phonics, enunciation, and language.  This support is often embedded in learning that is taking place in the other domains, such as in an activity that promotes physical development (like outdoor play). 

One of the benefits of entire child education is that this philosophy sees all developmental domains as equal in importance.  Schools used to take a cognitive approach to education, which was focused on providing instruction that enhanced their cognitive function.  It is important to be attuned to the cognitive function of each child, but to educate a child cognitively but ignore their other developmental domains does them a disservice. As was previously stated, children are not one domain, they are the sum of their parts. Each part deserves attention.