The Creative Curriculum^® for Infants, Toddlers & Twos is organized into four sections:

• The Foundation
• The Five Components of the Curriculum
• Routines
• Experiences

The Five Components of the Curriculum

Knowing Infants, Toddlers & Twos

Knowing Infants, Toddlers, and Twos describes the social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language development of children. It also discusses the characteristics and experiences that make each child unique, including temperament, life circumstances, dual language learning, and disabilities. It presents our goals and objectives for children and the Developmental Continuum, a tool for observing children's development and following their progress in relation to the 21 objectives.

Creating a Responsive Environment

Creating a Responsive Environment offers a model for setting up the physical environment for routines and experiences in ways that address the developing abilities and interests of infants, toddlers, and twos. It shows how to create a daily schedule and make weekly plans in ways that give you direction but allow flexibility.

What Children Are Learning

What Children Are Learning shows how the responsive relationship you form with each child, the interactions you have every day, and the materials and experiences you offer become the building blocks for successful learning. Language and literacy, discovering mathematical relationships, and scientific explorations are part of this discussion. Art and music are addressed in later chapters.

Caring and Teaching

Caring and Teaching describes the varied and interrelated roles of teachers who work with infants, toddlers, and twos. It offers strategies for building positive relationships, helping children develop self-regulation, and responding to challenging behaviors. It shows how to guide children's learning during daily routines and everyday experiences. Finally, it explains the role of ongoing assessment in learning about each child, following children's progress, and planning.

Partnering With Families

Building Partnerships With Families explores the benefits of working with families as partners in the care of their children. It explains how partnerships are built by exchanging information on a daily basis, involving families in all aspects of the program, communicating in respectful ways, and working through differences in ways that sustain the partnership and benefit the child.

Part 2: Routines

Part 2 of The Creative Curriculum for Infants, Toddlers & Twos (chapters 6-10) shows how daily routines are an important part of the curriculum and important times to put research and theory into practice. By responding consistently to children, you meet the basic needs identified by Abraham Maslow, T. Berry Brazelton, and Stanley Greenspan. Their work focused especially on the physical and social/emotional needs that are discussed in chapter 1.

The way you handle routines also enables you to help children build trust and autonomy, as explained by Erik Erikson. Your consistent and responsive care helps children develop secure attachments with the important people in their lives.
Each of the chapters in Part 2 includes questions to encourage you to think about your views about a particular routine. Information on safety and health is included because many routines require attention to those concerns. Because partnerships with families enable you to provide consistent care for each child, each chapter ends with a sample letter that invites families to be your partners in making routines rich learning opportunities for children.

Routines:

• Hellos and good-byes
• Diapering and toileting
• Eating and mealtimes
• Sleeping and nap time
• Getting dressed

Part 3: Experiences

Part 3 of The Creative Curriculum for Infants, Toddlers & Twos  (chapters 11-18) describes how various kinds of experiences support children's development and learning, suggests appropriate materials for each age group and explains how you can support children's learning by thoughtfully observing and responding to each child.

It discusses ways to engage children in playing with toys, imitating and pretending, enjoying stories and books, connecting with music and movement, creating with art, tasting and preparing food, exploring sand and water, and going outdoors.
This section also explains that, while planning for these experiences is important, you are only planning for possibilities because you must be able to respond to whatever interests a child. The letter that concludes each chapter will help you explain the value of the experience to children's families.

Experiences:

• Playing with toys
• Imitating and pretending
• Enjoying stories and books
• Connecting with music and movement
• Creating with art
• Tasting and preparing food
• Exploring sand and water
• Going outdoors