FAQ

What is the Flight Framework?

Flight is a curriculum framework intended to guide the significant work of early learning and child care educators with young children (ages 0 – before 6 years) and their families in centre-based child care and family day home settings. This is a flexible framework for thinking about how children learn and experience their worlds, as well as a guide that fosters strong early childhood communities.

Children’s play is central to this curriculum framework as an active, exploratory, creative, expressive process, deeply embedded in children’s everyday experiences and through which children participate in, learn about, and actively make sense of the world.

What is a curriculum framework? 

An early learning and child care curriculum framework is different than a traditional curriculum.

• In early childhood, curriculum is focused on broad holistic goals rather than specific outcomes for each subject area.

• Early learning and child care curriculum frameworks embrace children’s everyday experiences as the sources of curriculum meaning making.

• Early childhood educators use the goals in the curriculum framework to describe and interpret children’s everyday experiences.

• In early childhood, curriculum content is integrated, emerging from children’s fascination with the world.

• When educators notice children’s interest in exploring nature, people, places, and objects as well as print, stories, numbers, shapes, and patterns, and when they name the connections between these experiences and the holistic goals and children’s dispositions to learn, they are co-constructing early learning curriculum with young children and making the curriculum visible to others.

• Early childhood curriculum is embedded in children’s daily experience with their families and in local communities informing interactions, routines, experiences, and curriculum decisions in early learning and child care programs.

What is the image of the child in this community? How do we recognize each child as a mighty learner? How do our practices align, or not, with our understanding of these ideas? How do we rethink practices to align what we say and think with what we do?

These questions reveal some of the starting points that early childhood educators and communities have taken up in considering what the values, principles, holistic goals, and dispositions to learn outlined in Flight mean in their own setting. These conversations are shifting our understanding of curriculum in early childhood — from curriculum as something that is done to children, toward curriculum as a way of thinking about what children are doing in relationships of care, play, learning, and development.

Where can I learn more about the Flight Framework?

https://www.flightframework.ca.

Is Flight mandated by the Alberta Government? 

Currently the curriculum framework is not mandatory. It is available free of charge to any educator who wants to voluntarily engage with the ideas and concepts as a way to support their evolving practices, planning and provisions for young children’s learning. However, all Government of Alberta Early Learning and Child Care (ELCC) sites offering $25/day programs are using Flight to guide their daily practice.