Introduction
Contemporary curriculum approaches in early childhood education stress the magnitude of making available to the young children experiences that foster holistic development and promote positive attitudes. They should also be developmentally appropriate to the life and learning of the young children. Early childhood teachers therefore must acquire the knowledge necessary to implement and develop child centered curriculum practices that inherently stimulate and motivate the young ones desire to become engaged in their own learning. The realistic goals is to help a child achieve intellectual growth, develop a positive self concept, increase competence in skills in writing, reading, thinking, listening and speaking and to increase skills involved in physical coordination. It also helps a child to enlarge his world of experiences, ideas, things and people. These help the child to increase competence in dealing with emotional feelings, social situations, self direction and independence (Little, 1979).
Working with Pre-K age group children, calls for good class practices. Pre k/Pre kindergarten, being the first formal academic classroom-based learning environment that a child customarily attends, begins between the ages of 3-5 depending on how long the program is. It combines the focus to harvest a child’s cognitive, social, physical and emotional developments. This means it reflects an understanding of child development principles providing opportunities for the children to acquire concepts and skills involving decision making, problem solving, questioning, evaluating and discovering. An early childhood educator should therefore combine philosophies, theories and concepts that endorse the children with the opportunities to develop in all dimensions prior to basic education and future life.
The direct instruction method is an approach whereby stems of