A director’s thoughts on how to cultivate joyful, child-led learning
by Meghan Murray, The Nest at Greenfield Hill director
May 2025
“Interest in the subject at hand is the best stimulus for learning.” —John Dewey
When hosting families for curriculum night, I often ask them to recall a time in their childhood in which they learned something that was meaningful. Almost always, the parents’ recollections stray toward formative experiences that occurred outside of the school or classroom. Parents recall fishing in creeks and the joy of learning the species of fish; driving cross-country and watching the geography of states rolling by their car windows; visiting a museum and seeing a relic from Ancient Egypt.
This exercise illustrates that for children to remember learning, for it to truly stick with them, it needs to be derived from a genuine interest, a spark kindled from the real-world experiences around them that they will remember with detail many years into the future. Through their recollections, I demonstrate to families that this is not the kind of learning that most adults grew up experiencing in schools.
In this way, I introduce families to the idea of an emergent curriculum, which develops out of observing and knowing the children and the class’s interests. In an emergent curriculum approach, the teacher takes the wonderings, questions, and passions of the children and develops a curriculum that weaves in the content areas. Emergent curriculum is not a linear progression through a set of standards and content to be taught to children; it is a circular dance of observation, planning, implementation, reflection, and more observation.
Starting an Emergent Curriculum Approach
On a neighborhood walk by the ocean the children notice that the ducks are still in the water even though there is snow on the ground and they are bundled up in coats, hats, and mittens. The children notice the ducks’ heads are tucked down and they look like black buoys floating in the ocean. “Aren’t they cold?” one of the children asks. When we get back into the classroom we make a list of the questions that the children have pestered me with as we were walking home. Some of the children know that birds fly south for the winter. Why haven’t the ducks?
Changing from mandated or predetermined curriculum to an emergent curriculum approach can feel daunting. But thinking about the example above, the inquiries of the children provide easy access to fertile and engaging ideas. The children already have some knowledge, but their knowledge leads them to ask more questions. They saw these birds in real life. They felt the cold on their cheeks and in their fingertips, and their awe of the ducks who can float in the ocean and not feel that cold is profound. They want—need—to know more.
The spark of an emergent curriculum can also evolve from an event in the community, a seasonal shift, or something that the children are drawn to in their world. In all these cases, the key is to center learning around ideas that fascinate the children and that they have an invested interest in.
From a central interest, teachers of emergent curriculum can expand an idea or concept into new modes of learning and content areas. For instance, the teacher whose class noticed the ducks in the winter could begin parsing out the questions: How do the ducks stay in the water without getting cold? What birds migrate and what birds stay through the winter? What other animals have the children seen outdoors this winter? Through reflection and planning a teacher may find quick access points to cultivating the excitement of learning in science, visual and performing arts, building and dramatic play. In math and literacy, though, this sense of joy is often overshadowed by a misplaced emphasis on skills and learning via workbooks, worksheets, and prescribed curriculum. Emergent curriculum provides rich opportunities for deep and exciting math and literacy learning once educators find entry points into implementing this approach.
Bringing Content Learning into an Emergent Curriculum
In an Emergent Curriculum there are two primary entry points into the content areas for the child and the teacher:
Entry Point 1: Extending child learning and understanding out of their play and inquiries.
Entry Point 2: Planning learning activities based on topical interests and observations.
In the first entry point, the child is developing subject area concepts while playing, investigating, or exploring their interests. The teacher’s role in this dynamic is to extend the learning in a way that connects to academic skills and concepts that illuminate and deepen the child’s understanding.
In the second entry point, the teacher’s role is to observe ideas or interests that are central to the existing play in the class and plan content area activities that relate or are embedded into that topic.
Entry Point 1: Extending Learning and Understanding Across Content Areas:
A child has created a building in the block corner that he has worked on all morning. One child recently got back from a trip to Dubai and he shared with the children about visiting the Bhurj Kalifa, the tallest building in the world. The children became interested in trying to recreate the building in the block corner by looking at photographs. They have also tried creating some of the “tall” buildings in New York City, where they live. There is a picture of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, and the Freedom Tower hanging in the block corner. It is now time for the morning work period to end. The child who has been focused on creating his “tall” structure all morning is not ready to clean up and take it apart. “Why don’t you make a sign to save it?” suggests the teacher.
We know that children learn in many different ways. Emergent curriculum not only provides an opportunity to ground children’s learning in what they are excited about, but it gives teachers the opportunity to introduce skills and concepts simultaneously across content areas.
Looking at the Burj Kalifa example above, through block building, the children are learning and thinking about height, dimension, and turning a two-dimensional object into a three-dimensional structure. When the child is building the Burj Kalifa, the teacher can further his understanding of spatial awareness and mathematical concepts such as “high” and “tall” by asking questions, using targeted math vocabulary when they describe the structure, and encouraging the child to make new discoveries. “Wow, this building is so tall! How high do you think you can build it? Do you know how many blocks you used to make it this tall? How can we figure it out?”
When the child wants to save the building by labeling it with a title and his name, he develops the motor skills for writing. He is also practicing basic phonic skills needed to learn how to read. With the teacher’s suggestion and guidance, the activity has become an exercise in developing pre-literacy knowledge and understanding.
These are spontaneous moments, in which the teacher capitalizes on something they observe and then draws forward the math and literacy elements. However, through the second entry point, math and literacy can also be introduced and planned in a purposeful way.
Entry Point 2: Planning learning activities based on topical interests and observations.
When a teacher observes an idea or concept that they know the children are invested in, they can begin to think creatively about how to expand this throughout all areas of the classroom. Our world does not separate out subjects into neat categories. Emergent curriculum mirrors real life with an integrated approach to learning which is consistent with the world that our children live in.
Weaving Math into the Curriculum:
Still, when we think about preschool-aged classrooms there are basic math concepts and skills that we want children to develop. These include:
- Counting
- Sorting, organizing, and classifying
- Spatial relationships
- Seriation
- Measurement
- One-to-one correspondence
As teachers who are reflecting and planning for our classroom, we can structure opportunities to bring math and literacy into how we expand the children’s interests. For example, for the class whose interest in studying animals in the winter was piqued by the ducks, the teacher can build on this experience by creating a survey, asking: What animals have you seen outside this winter? Squirrels, ducks, or foxes? Children considered the question and wrote their name under one category.
What are the math skills embedded in this activity? The children are learning to sort and organize data. They have to count the names in each category and tally up the number. Then they have to make mathematical comparisons—which category got the most? Which category got the least? This is a planned math activity that is built out of the passions and inquiry of the children. It has meaning to them because it is grounded in an observation from their world. In this way, the teacher used reflection and planning to bring math into the emergent curriculum.
Weaving in Language and Literacy
The survey also provides opportunities for literacy as well. For pre-writers, labels with the children’s names can be written by a teacher who can work with each child to identify their name by the first letter. As teachers, we know that names are an exciting entry point into literacy as children take pride in being able to identify and “read” their own name. For beginning writers, children can write their own names onto the survey. Hanging the survey up in the classroom at eye level allows for the children to go back and re-read it, count the names on their own and continue to engage with the activity over and over.
An emergent curriculum provides opportunities to incorporate language and literacy at many different levels. Delving into a discussion or topic can be a source of new vocabulary, it can spark conversations, and it can be an opening to practice fine motor development and phonetic learning needed for reading and writing.
A teacher can also introduce new books when a new interest emerges. For example, one child who visited a pond over the weekend comes in talking about tadpoles and the children are fascinated. The teacher responds by bringing in non-fiction books about the life cycle of a frog to study. Now the children are drawing pictures of tadpoles and sounding out the words. Books provide many opportunities to learn more information or to think deeper about an idea, and they are vehicles for rich and exciting discussions.
As children move into the developmental age in which they are developing their writing and reading, the teacher can include opportunities to incorporate these skills into an emergent curriculum. Some language and literacy entry points are:
- Developing vocabulary
- Incorporating books into the curriculum: fiction and non-fiction
- Discussing the topic (Write down children’s conversations and include them in your documentation)
- Encouraging writing (when developmentally appropriate) by:
- Asking children to label buildings, artwork, or creations
- Keeping an observation journal where they draw and label or write about what they are noticing in their studies
- Making lists (e.g., a list of questions or a grocery shopping list for a cooking project)
- Writing down ideas, stories, or poems for children who are not developmentally ready for writing
- Encouraging drawing in all areas of emergent curriculum (Drawing is a pre-literacy skill as it develops fine motor control and is symbolic representation.)
What is so exciting about developing math and literacy curriculum in this way is that the learning has purpose. Rather than having a child practice writing the letter “a” over and over again on a worksheet, they practice writing it over and over again as they make a grocery shopping list for ingredients for the class to make applesauce muffins. The child returning to the block corner the next day looks at a picture of his building and counts how many blocks he needs to recreate the “tall building” from the day before. Each activity is authentic to the larger context of learning and connected to the children in a personal and exciting way.
The Joy of Meaningful Learning
On Tuesday when we went to the gym, the children continued a measuring investigation to discover how many children it would take to measure the whole space. One child directed her peers where to lie down and counted them all the way across the gym! We discovered that it takes 25 children to get from one side of the room to the other. The children had decided on an estimate of 30 children and were excited to see how close their guess was.
A child’s light bulb moment—when they figure something out, solve a problem, or come up with a new idea — is part of the wonder of teaching. Cultivating these moments in the classroom nurtures children’s natural curiosity and deepens their understanding. Through careful observation, thoughtful reflection, intentional planning, and trust in their students, teachers create learning experiences that leave a lasting impact, shaping knowledge that children will carry with them into adulthood.
This article was originally featured on the Community Playthings website.
For more of Meghan’s writings on emergent curriculum and early childhood education, visit: https://learnagora.com/