The IUPUI Center for Young Children offers a valuable and unique STEM classroom learning experience that nurtures your 3 – 6 yr. old child’s inquisitive nature. CYC engages your child in a fun and exciting learning method, the scientific inquiry method, so your child can observe, examine, question, analyze and discover the world around them. The STEM classroom is now enrolling for Fall 2016. For more information, visit childcare.iupui.edu.
STEM Education is important to our country’s long-term competitiveness because it prepares today’s young children for the required competencies of jobs that are growing more technologically advanced by the day.
The STEM classrooms at the Center for Young Children (CYC) will align to our university academic mission to advance the state of Indiana and the intellectual growth of its citizens to the highest levels nationally and internationally through research and creative activity, teaching and learning, and civic engagement. IUPUI 2025 Strategic Initiative to Contribute to the Well-being of the Citizens of Indianapolis, the State of Indiana, and Beyond focuses on the strength of IUPUI in health, life sciences, and STEM disciplines. The CYC will offer two STEM-focused classrooms beginning in August of 2015.
In 2010, famed early childhood educator and guest speaker at IUPUI, Lilian Katz, wrote a paper entitled, “STEM in the early years.” She wrote, “Extensive experience of working with young children and their teachers confirms the supposition that all children are innately curious and eager to explore their environments and learn about a wide variety of causes and effects. In this sense, our early education pedagogical methods should support these basic dispositions and provide a wide range of contexts for young children to use them.”
The STEM Preschool program at the IUPUI Center for Young Children will provide these experiences and contexts using the Collections Curriculum as developed by Kori Bardige and Melissa Russell for the Hundred Acre School at Heritage Museums & Gardens Inc. The vision states that the “Collections Curriculum encourages children to be curious, to wonder, think, play, question, and connect with the world around them, so they will become innovators able to make great contributions to society.”
For more information about the curriculum: Click Here
For more information regarding a daily outline: Click Here
