An experimental curriculum for Culturally Deprived Kindergarten Children.

The article describes a curriculum specifically designed to meet the assumed educational needs of the culturally deprived of kindergarten children. The article writers agree that both subject selection and curriculum development need to be based on some logically consistent rationale so that hypotheses could be constructed and tested. Cultural deprivation was defined as having its most notable effects on school children along four dimensions. Underdeveloped expressive and receptive language skills will be evident among deprived kindergarten children, and will negatively affect their school achievement. The deprived child will have had minimal training in the conventional manners and social amenities accepted by his middle-class teachers. The purpose of curricular structure was to aim instruction at those skills which deprived children lack, but which seem to be universal requisites to school success. The curriculum framework included entries such as the sequential use of words, role adaptation, and belief in one's own success potential. According to some experimenters trips were assumed to be valuable in eliciting linguistic responses from children; language output could not be expected without provision for input. The planning and evaluation experiences relating to field trips provided key classroom opportunities for the growth of language facility.