Developmentally Appropriate Practice

As a teacher I would often hear the term, developmentally appropriate practice or DAP often. It is used to refer to a set of guidelines that describe best practice in educating young children birth through 8 years of age.

Because these guidelines were developed for educators, people outside the education world may not always recognize these principles when working with children. I believe these principles in its most basic form still apply in any teaching environment of children -- yoga included.

As a teacher of yoga, my goal is still to teach and for children to learn. In order to do this I must design my lessons so they will be understandable to the children I teach. The heart of DAP are these three principles:
1. Knowledge must inform decision making.
2. Goals must be challenging and achievable.
3. Teaching must be intentional to be effective.

An example of this would be the class I teach -- Big Yogi, Little Yogi. The class is intentionally shorter time wise than other classes and also purposefully has an adult that must attend with each child. This is all based on where the 3-5 yo child is developmentally. They are completely capable of trying the poses and fully capable of learning, but they can also at the drop of the hat switch their attention to a spider crawling up the wall-- which is completely okay.
In this class one of the topics we discussed and built our practice around was the topic of family. All children have an idea of what family is and the type of family they live in -- which varies so much today. It gives kids the opportunity to talk about something they each know well from their individual perspectives as well as relate too when we do poses that have to do with family. Also, picking a piece of literature such as, My Daddy Is a Pretzel, helps them to listen to jobs that family members might do, poses that we can associate with those jobs, and opens up the door for their own creativity and making up poses that fit their family.

The most important part of this all is the idea of learning through play which is key and of course FUN!

For more information on DAP please visit NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children).

Peace and Hugs,
Candace