Standard #1 Promoting Child Development and Learning.

This standard is talking about understanding and knowing a child's needs. Children must feel
safe and happy before they can learn in creative ways. A teacher must understand not just the
influences on their development including but not limited to how their family and community
impacts the child. This is important to help the child build a strong foundation which can help
children learn in challenging ways. As for a child to be challenged a teacher must understand a
child's learning style and how to give that child every opportunity to learn and be challenged.
There are many ways to promote child development and learning. Play is an excellent form of
promoting learning and development. In this exercise from the class CHD 215 - Preschool
Constructivist Lesson Plan for Models in Early Childhood - I developed a lesson plan for young
children to explore object density by determining which objects sink and which objects float.
This lesson plan involves reading the book What Floats? What Sinks?: A Look at Density by
Jennifer Boothroyd. Upon completion of the book, the children are separated into two groups;
verbal learners and non-verbal learners. The goal of this is to allow the non-verbal learners to
explore without feeling dominated by the verbal learners. Each group receives a large container
of water and various objects which they have chosen. The children are asked to make predictions
about which objects will sink and which will float. The children then explore density by placing
each object, one at a time, into the container of water to see which ones sink and which ones
float. Afterwards, the children compare the outcomes of their experiments with their predictions.
We then discuss our findings as a class.
Through developing this lesson plan I learned how important it is to provide young children with
multiple different methods of obtaining the same knowledge in a supportive environment. By
reading the book first, I provide the auditory learners in the classroom all of the information
using their preferred method of learning. This knowledge is then reinforced when they become
engaged in the activity. For the tactile learners in the group, the book is an entertaining
introduction to the activity, which is where the knowledge is integrated and cemented in their
minds. By allowing the children to select the objects on which to experiment I am demonstrating
that our classroom is a safe, fun place to explore and develop some autonomy. Making
predictions about which objects will sink and which objects will float gives the children an
opportunity to test their current understanding of object density. Conducting the experiment is a
fun, positive way for the children to really understand the knowledge communicated in the book.
When the experiment is complete and the children have had the chance to determine which
objects sink and which objects float, the entire group is involved in comparing their predictions
about the objects with the outcomes of the experiments. The benefit of this is twofold; first, the
children gain a more complete understanding of object density and finalize that understanding in
their minds; secondly, the children get the opportunity to see that knowledge was gained and no
harm was done when an incorrect prediction was made. It is vital for the children to understand

that failure, in this case an incorrect prediction, is often encountered on the road to success and
that their classroom environment is one in which it is safe to fail.