WHAT IS ACCESS?

ACCESS Curriculum has been developed by early childhood faculty and implemented at the University of Dayton's (UD) demonstration school, the Bombeck Family Learning Center (Bombeck Center). The work reflects years of partnering with teachers who work with children and families at the Bombeck Center and in early childhood education programs across the country.
The ACCESS Curriculum is based on the belief that children are unique, capable individuals who are able to construct their own knowledge. It is grounded in early childhood research and theory, and knowledge of early childhood development.
The Bombeck Center teachers and administrators have worked with UD's early childhood faculty to develop and implement this curriculum that:

Uses assessment data to support instructional decision making
Encourages high quality teacher-child interactions and is child-centered and play-based
Benefits from an emergent negotiated curriculum component that incorporates integrated project-based learning
Provides children with opportunities to acquire both developmental skills and early learning content
Supports teacher development of in-depth content knowledge to support child outcomes

ACCESS is framed by the six significant areas of development:

social and emotional
language and literacy
cognitive including science and math
physical and health
approaches to learning including executive functioning.

The curriculum affords children the opportunity to grow in their understanding of their worlds through extended investigations. Topics for investigations are determined through observation of the children's interests, the topic's relevance to the children, opportunity for direct investigation, readily availability of resources, ease of representation through a variety of media, and ability to support children's development and learning of age appropriate content. This emergent form of curriculum allows children, through structured and unstructured play and other forms of active learning, to process and reflect upon their experiences as they develop in a community of learners.
ACCESS supports learning through ongoing program evaluation and documentation of learning used to inform instructional decisions. Authentic assessment is aggregated allowing educators to view the progress of the whole class as well as individual students.

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