Key Concepts guide the ECP programs and form a continuum leading to children’s preparation for the academic standards which frame elementary school learning. Each Key Concept embodies many developmental skills and concepts.

Social and Emotional Development: Learn to thrive in a group outside the family. Know your feelings, and talk about them.
Initiative and Social Relations: Learn to be a friend, a helper, a leader.
Language and Literacy: Learn how words stand for thoughts. Written words hold ideas we can share.
Communication Tools: Share ideas in your many languages: words, structures, paintings, your moving body.
Mathematics Learning and Development: Learn counting, shapes, volumes, and time. Use these ideas to learn about the world.
Science: Learn how things work and why.
Movement: Use your body to move in large ways and small, careful ways to do your best.
Music: Love music. Sing, dance, play. Learn the language of organized sound.

Teaching Methods

ECP 3-4 and ECP JK teachers carry the Key Concepts to every teaching task choosing the appropriate teaching methods and resources to empower students. They teach Key Concepts in three important ways:

Teacher-child interactions: Every teacher-child interaction is a learning opportunity. Grounded in respect, love, and trust, the child learns from the teacher and the teacher from the child.

Small groups: Whether a circle time or a small group orchestrated by the teacher to attend to a particular kind of learning, children learn from each other and from the teacher.

Project-based learning: In this dynamic and sometimes extended process, the teacher integrates the key concepts into the child’s spontaneous, day-to-day discoveries, interests, and questions. Teachers also provoke the children’s curiosity with unique and intriguing ideas. In turn, each child’s experiences, personality, knowledge, skills, and interests determine what, how and even whether a child will learn from any given activity.

The Trinity ECP programs provide the time, space, expertise, and guidance to prepare children for elementary school through an unhurried, child-centered set of experiences