Adventures in Learning Introduction

Adventures in Learning, a comprehensive curriculum for children from three to five, was developed through a grant from the Division of Child Care and Early Childhood Education.  The curriculum features 40 topics of study in nine focus areas.  Each topic is introduced with familiar children’s books and has a strong language and literacy emphasis.  Many of the resources available from the Division were included in the development of Adventures in Learning.

While Adventures in Learning is a comprehensive curriculum, it can also be a supplement to an established curriculum.  The curriculum is flexible and allows teachers to choose from 40 topics of study and to decide when to explore the topics with the children.

During development of Adventures in Learning, four early care and education programs  served as pilot sites for the project.  Curriculum materials were also sent to reviewers for comments.  Feedback received from these two sources was considered as revisions were made to the curriculum materials.

Three early childhood educators, Dot Brown, Beverly C. Wright and Trude Puckett, spent more than a year developing the Adventures in Learning curriculum.  While the careers of the three developers have taken different paths, they share similar education backgrounds and work experiences.  The list that follows applies to all three developers and highlights the similarities.

• Masters of Education degrees with an early childhood emphasis
• Instructors of early childhood courses
• Monitors, evaluators, supervisors and mentors in preschool classrooms
• Evaluators of curriculum for children from three to five
• Registered trainers in the Arkansas Early Childhood Professional Development Registry
• Certified Pre-K ELLA trainers

Currently, Dot Brown, President of Early Childhood Services, Inc., focuses on the development of training materials.  Beverly C. Wright is an adjunct instructor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Trude Puckett is an early childhood instructor at Pulaski Technical College.  All three remain committed to making available to caregivers and teachers the support and the resources they need to provide quality care and education for children from three to five.

In order to remain focused on best practice, the developers of Adventures in Learning frequently referred to three publications, Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs, Revised Edition, Learning to Read and Write and The Creative Curriculum for Preschool, Fourth Edition.  These three publications have a firm research base.

The development of Adventures in Learning has been fun.  Now you are invited to explore and enjoy Adventures in Learning with your children!