Developmentally Appropriate Practice

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Developmentally Appropriate Practice is often referred as DAP and is used in the educational world. According to the (National Association for the Education of Young Children) NAEYC position statement DAP can be defined as followed (Copple, 2009):
1. DAP requires both meeting children where they are and enabling them to reach goals that are both challenging and achievable.
2. All teaching practices should be appropriate to children’s age and developmental status, attuned to then as unique individuals, and responsive to the social and cultural contexts in which they live.
3. It means ensuring that goals and experiences are suited to their learning and development and challenging enough to promote their progress and interest.
4. Those principles
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While the majority of preschoolers can not read, these are the years in which they develop the proper skills to be able to read later on. Teachers should read often to the children but it entitles more then using a “normal” voice and reading without much involvement of the preschoolers. To consider reading a developmentally appropriate practice, teachers need to read in both small and large groups. Teachers read with expression and change voices according to the character. Educators need to ask questions about the book that encourage the preschooler to think about real-life situations, cause and effect, mathematics, science, literacy, cultural differences and/or life skills. Books vary between cultures and include a broad vocabulary while being age appropriate. The teacher provides opportunities to have guest readers and allow preschoolers to listen to books through …show more content…
Mathematics is more than counting; it involves numbers and operations, geometry, spatial relationships and measurement, all of which can be included into learning centers for preschoolers. For mathematics to be considered DAP teachers need to encourage reasoning and problem solving using life-based situations in interesting and well-thought-out activities. Teachers need to allow the preschoolers to process the problem and think of ways to solve it on their own first. If the problem is to hard for the preschoolers, teachers do not give the answer right away, but give clues that can help the child come up with their own answer (example of scaffolding). Mathematics can be viewed as steps in learning instead of parallel learning.
Math skills are based on foundational concepts and need to be taught in a certain order to allow time to master each concept before moving on to the next skill. If a concept is not mastered, preschoolers may have a challenging time mastering further math skills. The example of steps can illustrate the learning. First there are foundational skills, such as counting. Counting can be considered the base or the floor in our example. The next skill many include learning to group like items. Once that is mastered a base of the new step can be started such as

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