Recently, the National Framework of Early Childhood Stimulation 2024 titled Navchetana was released.
Key points
- It lays down month-by-month activities to be conducted by parents, anganwadi staff and ASHA workers for children from birth to the age of three.
- ‘Navchetana’ is the activity-based curriculum wich follows the National Education Policy 2020 that calls for a continuum of learning.
- Staff in 14 lakh anganwadis will be given training on the curriculum.
- The curriculum involves talking, playing, moving, listening to music and sounds, and stimulation of all the other senses — particularly sight and touch in order to reach developmental milestones across domains, and develop “early language, and emergent literacy and numeracy”.
- The document entails 36 sets of activities for children from months 0 to 36. It encourages the use of household objects like cups, bottles or leftover pieces of fabric.
- Activities involve reaching for objects, imitating sounds, spinning bangles, putting objects in and out of a jar and removing knots in a handkerchief in the first year.
