The experience-oriented approach to early childhood learning assumes that the way children see, understand, and conceptualize is more basic than skills and knowledge, and that preschools should systematically work on developing children's awareness of different phenomena in the world around them. Content areas in this approach foster children's: (1) awareness of reading and writing skills; (2) experience of numbers and development of arithmetic skills, by getting children to grasp the meaning of numbers generally, and their meaning in different aspects of counting; (3) awareness of the natural world, including the ecological cycle, growth, living and dead things, and the change of seasons; (4) understanding of aspects of the human-made world, including history, culture, and geography; and (5) understanding of their own learning process. Teachers should become informed about research on and descriptions of children's thinking, and develop their knowledge pertaining to methods of interviewing and principles for planning thematic instruction. The experience-oriented approach acknowledges that children learn from one another, children talk and reflect on concrete situations, and teachers can expose the processes by which children think and take advantage of these processes in their instruction. A list of 44 references and samples of children's artwork are included. (HTH)