Early Childhood Education

As a student in the Early Childhood Education program, students learn to provide high standards of care to children and their families. This highly regarded program will teach learners to take responsibility for observing the needs of individuals and groups of children and create well-planned, stimulating, and responsive programs. Students will come to understand the needs of infants, toddlers, pre-school and school-aged children.

Rich classroom experiences, with professors employing a variety of strategies, will offer a range of opportunities to understand the content, practice, and apply what has been taught. Supporting this program are Centennial College’s two state-of-the-art early childhood education centres. Used as lab schools, these centres, located in East York and at Progress Campus, will allow students to observe and/or practice in a high-quality childcare setting.

What You’ll Learn

• Create learning contexts to enable, build, and maintain caring, responsive relationships in partnerships with children, families, and communities that value and respect social, cultural, and linguistic diversity including Indigenous peoples’ worldviews and Francophone identity.
• Co-create, facilitate, and reflect upon inquiry and play-based early years and child care programs and pedagogical approaches to support children’s learning, holistic development, and well-being following children’s capabilities, interests, ideas, and experiences.
• Co-design and maintain inclusive early learning environments to value and support equitable, accessible, and meaningful learning opportunities for all children, their families, and communities in a range of early years and childcare settings.
• Collaborate with children, families, colleagues, agencies and community partners to create, maintain, evaluate, and promote safe and healthy early learning environments to support independence, reasonable risk-taking, and healthy development and well-being.
• Use observation strategies to identify children’s strengths and challenges and to ascertain when children and families might benefit from additional support or community resources.

Additional ancillary fees for career services, health and counselling, athletics, student ID cards, and more may apply.