About
Growing Curious Children began with a simple shift: away from ticking statements off, toward seeing the child in front of you.
Growing Curious Children (GCC) is a practitioner-facing early years curriculum and assessment framework. It grew out of nineteen years of practice and a discomfort with early years assessment that reduces a child to a list of statements. The founding conviction is that the child is the curriculum: our task is to notice, follow and grow what is already there, rather than to fill a child up against a checklist.
Development is described across eight domains, each with three strands, and observed through three phases: Seed, Shoot and Flower. The phases describe how a capacity is growing rather than how far ahead or behind a child sits. The signature domain, Curiosity and Independence, is the thread that runs through the whole framework.
Seeing Children Clearly is the educator companion to the framework, written to help practitioners put the domains, strands and phases to work in real settings. It sits behind the resources and training on this site and behind the observation practice the framework is built for. The aim is for it to grow into a published book, and for the training and CPD to be built on it.
Growing Curious Children is the practitioner-facing sibling of Grounded Parenting, the parent-facing content and resource brand. The two share a visual family and a body of thinking; Grounded Parenting speaks to families at home, while Growing Curious Children speaks to practitioners in settings. Many of the articles here begin life as Grounded Parenting pieces and are reframed for professional practice.
Susanne Rice is a registered childminder with an MEd and MRes, and an EdD researcher. She is the founder of Growing Curious Children and Grounded Parenting.