Developmental Education for Young Children in the Netherlands: Basic Development

Abstract

This chapter describes Starting Blocks and Basic Development. This approach and curriculum provides possible answers for professionals working with young children. We focus on broad development of children by creating meaningful teaching opportunities in the context of play. We define play as a specific format of cultural activities that are characterised by rules that constitute the activity, high levels of involvement and the degrees of freedom that the cultural community allows to the player (B. van Oers, 2010). In Basic Development, we start from activities infused with sociocultural contents matching with everyday situations, books, stories, etc. The professional’s role is important. During play and other activities, the professional is alert for ‘teaching opportunities’, taking care that the quality of play is not impaired. In activities and dialogue, both professional and children cooperate in a dynamic process. We use five didactic impulses to structure the professionals assistance (Janssen-Vos 2008) for promoting children’s meaningful learning in play. These five impulses are useful to achieve the balance between the active process of meaning making of the children and the explicit educational goals and expected results. In this chapter we describe some examples and give insight into the ingredients of Starting Blocks and Basic Development. We finally describe the implementation strategy, focusing on the enhancement of the adults’ abilities to work with a play-based curriculum in their own everyday practices.