About Us
Community Help and Involvement in Low- income Decisions, referred to as C.H.I.L.D., Inc., was incorporated in 1977. We are a private non-profit agency that provides comprehensive child development and family support services for low to moderate income families residing in Kent County, Rhode Island. C.H.I.L.D., Inc. is a Federal grantee for Head Start and Early Head Start services. Head Start programs provide high-quality, prenatal services and standards-based early education and care that support children’s school readiness and promote family well-being. In addition to federal funding, C.H.I.L.D., Inc. receives funding from the state of Rhode Island to supplement our Head Start funding. C.H.I.L.D., Inc. is a grant-funded provider of the Rhode Island State Pre-K program, administered by the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) and a contracted provider of the Rhode Island Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), administered by the Rhode Island Department of Human Services (DHS).
Philosophy
We believe that children are able to learn and grow when they feel safe and cared for, have strong relationships with nurturing adults, and are appropriately challenged. We believe the foundation for supporting and enhancing young children’s physical, social, emotional, and intellectual development is rooted in play. We embrace the notion that children learn by doing not just watching.
Children, through their own experiences, past and present, begin to organize and understand concepts. Children need to develop problem solving and decision-making skills, and learn how to get along with others. They need to develop self-control and independence, and feel valued and accepted by the people who are most important to them. C.H.I.L.D., Inc. recognizes that a healthy self-concept is critical for learning to take place. Our commitment is to bring about a greater degree of social competence in the children enrolled in our programs. The goal is the overall presence of physical and emotional wellbeing which supports the development of skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary for success in school and for later learning and life.
C.H.I.L.D., Inc. acknowledges that children grow and develop at very different rates. We also realize that children learn in very different ways. We embrace each child’s learning style(s), recognizing that a child’s successful responsiveness to the curriculum is dependent on ability to understand, interest level, attention span, and frustration level. Additionally, we recognize the importance of understanding each child’s temperament, realizing that it influences both the choices a child makes as well as the child’s basic response to given situations.
C.H.I.L.D., Inc. believes that strong children come from strong families and communities. We recognize the importance of the collaboration of all individuals involved in the life of a child to ensure successful participation in the program. All children are welcomed into the program and treated as individuals. We affirm that family is the most critical aspect of a child’s life and celebrate the fact that all children and families are unique. We believe it is through experiences in family life that children begin to develop attitudes regarding the acceptance and respect of other people as individuals. C.H.I.L.D., Inc. recognizes parents as their child’s primary teachers. Most importantly, understanding that the values and expectations of the family powerfully influence development, we respect the ethnic and cultural background of each child and guide curriculum decisions accordingly. We support a close parent-teacher partnership to ensure the curriculum addresses the needs of each individual child and that learning and growth will be supported both at home and at school.
Curriculum
C.H.I.L.D., Inc. believes a high-quality curriculum must be based on theories, research, and current trends of best practices in child development, early learning, and teacher effectiveness.
C.H.I.L.D., Inc. uses The Creative Curriculum for our center-based program options and Frog Street’s Love and Learn Curriculum, for our home-based program option. These curricula include lessons and activities specific to the following learning domains: Social/Emotional, Language, Literacy, Cognition, Math, Science, Social Studies, Creative Arts and Physical Health and Motor Development. We embrace that a well-articulated curriculum, drawn on research, supports programs in establishing policies and practices to assist teachers in identifying important concepts and skills across a broad range of developmental domains and content areas as well as effective methods for fostering children’s learning and development.
C.H.I.L.D., Inc. recognizes that young children need many opportunities to make choices and thus direct their own learning. Children, through their own experiences, not solely adult direction, begin to organize and understand concepts. Our curriculum provides a balance between child-centered, teacher directed, individual and group, quiet and noisy, indoor and outdoor experiences.
C.H.I.L.D., Inc. enrolls children and families from widely diverse backgrounds whose cultural traditions of celebration are just as widely diverse. Although we acknowledge and respect the richness of family traditions, holidays are generally not celebrated in the classroom unless they are equally relevant to each child in the group. Teachers are, however, expected to regularly plan activities as part of their Social Studies curriculum, activities during which children will gain awareness of and respect for similarities and differences in people and their traditions.
