To answer some of the questions brought up last week, I think the biggest factor that preschools are in competition over are families. We need families because basically that’s our schools revenue. I don’t think that collaboration would hurt our business because I believe every preschool is different and there are many components to each preschool that sets it apart from the next school. Families have a checklist when it comes to sending their child to school, they could be looking for religion, location, prices and curriculum. If the schools in the community collaborate it won’t matter much because families are going to go where they want to go.

Chapter 9 discusses program curriculum. It details all the different types of curriculum and how important class size and ratio are to a program. When touring our school, a lot of families ask what are the ratios in each of the classrooms. Ratios are important but I also believe class size is equally if not more important. If you think about it if there ratio is 1:8 for 3 year olds but you have 4 staff members and 32 3 year olds that classroom, no matter the size, would be hectic. What we like to do at our center is split up the classes. We are blessed to have a covered lanai and materials that we can use outside on that lanai so we can have half of the class inside the classroom and the other half outside of the classroom. This way each staff will have the max 10 children in the class or on the lanai (for the 4 year old room). I have enjoyed the small group size and I feel that I can focus my attention on each student in my class.

The book also talked about culture as part of the curriculum. “Besides developing program philosophy influenced by the culture of the local community, all children need multicultural/anti bias education” (Decker et al., 2005). It is important to have culture represented throughout the curriculum and I know NAEYC pushes this point a lot! My center is having a hard time with this. We have been reflecting on it especially after we went to some great cultural workshops at the HAEYC conference. I think the issue we are running into is that mostly everyone on our staff is local and have been raised here. It is amazing that Hawaii has become so diverse with many different cultures but at the same time we aren’t fully knowledgeable in any particular culture. For example, I am Filipino and Lithuanian but I don’t know anything about the Philippines, I don’t even know what dialect my family spoke. I’m fluent in the local culture, which is just bits and pieces of other cultures, but it’s so integrated that I don’t know where one cultures ends and the other begins.

Our additional reading discussed the Te Whāriki, which is the first bicultural curriculum developed in New Zealand. It contains curriculum specifically for Māori immersion services in early childhood education and establishes, throughout the document as a whole, the bicultural nature of curriculum for all early childhood services (website). This reminded me of the Hawaiian emergent preschools we have here. I think it’s a great idea and I truly believe that it’s everyone’s responsibility to preserve the Hawaiian language and culture. The dichotomy in these programs is finding teachers who are knowledgeable in ECE and teachers who are knowledgeable in the culture. Many times the program will take the teacher who is knowledgeable in the culture because that is harder to find, but they aren’t aware of developmentally appropriate practices. How can we find a happy medium?