Primary School Curriculum Curaclam na Bunscoile - NCCA

Chapter 2 Children and learning
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The child’s sense of
wonder and natural
curiosity
The child as an active
agent in his or her
learning
The developmental
nature of learning
The child’s knowledge and
experience as a base
for learning
Children and learning
The principles of learning in the curriculum
Learning can be described as any experience that contributes to the child’s
development. It is a process that begins before birth and reflects the child’s
experience of and interaction with his or her environment. Its rate of progress
is most rapid during the early years, and by the time the child comes to
school he or she has already acquired a complex range of knowledge,
concepts, skills and values.
The impulse for such learning is the child’s sense of wonder at the complexity
of the world, the desire to understand it, and the spontaneous impetus to
explore it through play. This sense of wonder, together with the child’s natural
curiosity, is at the heart of the learning process and provides the purest and
most valuable motivating factor in the child’s learning. It is in cultivating the
sense of wonder that the curriculum can provide the most fulfilling learning
experience for the child and foster an appreciation of the value of learning.
It is an underlying principle of the curriculum that the child should be an
active agent in his or her own learning. The structure and content of the
curriculum are designed to provide opportunities for active engagement in
a wide range of learning experiences and to encourage children to respond
in a variety of ways to particular content and teaching strategies.
Conceptual development is not necessarily a linear process. It may take
place on a number of planes simultaneously or through the making of an
intuitive leap. Having dealt with particular knowledge, ideas and skills at
a simple level, the child should have the opportunity to return to them at
regular intervals in order to deepen his or her understanding. In this way
the curriculum allows for the complexity of the learning process and for
a coherent expansion of the child’s conceptual framework.
It is a fundamental principle of the curriculum that the child’s existing
knowledge and experience should be the starting point for acquiring new
understanding. The curriculum enables the child to move from the known
to the unknown, from the simple to the more complex, from the concrete
to the abstract, benefitting from a learning experience that is effective,
coherent, and relevant.