High Scope Philophies include:

1. Children making their own choices within limits
2. An open framework curriculum with emphasis on planning by children and teachers
3. Helping children problem solve and think critically
4. Fostering children's independence
5. Extending children's language and communication skills

For preschool-aged children, learning is not achieved through drills and memorization of facts. Main Street Child Development Center maintains these principles:

1. Children learn by doing
2. Children learn by moving from concrete to abstract thought processes
3. Children learn through social interactions
4. Children learn by having meaningful experiences, known as key indicators

High Scope Key Indicators:

1. Approaches to Learning
2. Language, Literacy, & Communication
3. Social and Emotional Development
4. Physical Development, Health, & Well-Being
5. Arts and Sciences

1. Approaches to Learning

• Making and expressing choices, plans, and decisions
• Solving problems encountered in play

2. Language, Literacy, and Communication 

• Talking with others about personally meaningful experiences
• Describing objects, events, and relations
• Having fun with language: listening to stories and poems, making up stories and rhymes
• Writing in various ways: drawing, scribbling, letter-like forms, invented spelling, conventional forms
• Reading in various ways: reading storybooks, signs and symbols, one's own writing
• Dictating stories 

3. Social and Emotional Development

• Taking care of one's own needs
• Expressing feelings in words
• Building relationships with children and adults
• Creating and experiencing collaborative play
• Dealing with social conflict 

4. Physical Development, Health, and Well-Being

• Moving in nonlocomotor ways (anchored movement: bending, twisting, rocking, swinging one's arms
• Moving in locomotor ways (nonanchored movement: running, jumping, hopping, skipping, marching, climbing)
• Moving with objects
• Expressing creativity in movement
• Describing movement
• Acting upon movement directions
• Feeling and expressing steady beat
• Moving in sequences to a common beat 

5. Arts and Sciences

Mathematics

Seriation

• Comparing attributes (longer/shorter, bigger/smaller)
• Arranging several things one after another in a series or pattern and describing the relationships(big/bigger/biggest, red/blue/red/blue)
• Fitting one ordered set of objects to another through trial and error (small cup—small saucer/medium cup—medium saucer/big cup—big saucer)

Number

• Comparing the numbers of things in two sets to determine "more," "fewer," "same number"
• Arranging two sets of objects in one-to-one correspondence
• Counting objects 

Space

• Filling and emptying
• Fitting things together and taking them apart
• Changing the shape and arrangement of objects (wrapping, twisting, stretching, stacking, enclosing)
• Observing people, places, and things from different spatial viewpoints
• Experiencing and describing positions, directions, and distances in the play space, building, and neighborhood
• Interpreting spatial relations in drawings, pictures, and photographs

Science and Technology

Classification

• Recognizing objects by sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell
• Exploring and describing similarities, differences, and the attributes of things
• Distinguishing and describing shapes 
• Sorting and matching
• Using and describing something in several ways
• Holding more than one attribute in mind at a time
• Distinguishing between "some" and "all"
• Describing characteristics something does not possess or what class it does not belong to 

Time

• Starting and stopping an action on signal
• Experiencing and describing rates of movement
• Experiencing and comparing time intervals
• Anticipating, remembering, and describing sequences of events 

Social Studies

• Participating in group routines
• Being sensitive to the feelings, interests, and needs of others 

The Arts

Visual Art

• Relating models, pictures, and photographs to real places and things
• Making models out of clay, blocks, and other materials
• Drawing and painting 

Dramatic Art

• Imitating actions and sounds
• Pretending and role playing 

Music

• Moving to music
• Exploring and identifying sounds
• Exploring the singing voice
• Developing melody
• Singing songs
• Playing simple musical instruments

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