Preschool Curriculum: What’s In it for Children and Teachers

What are very young children capable of learning? What are the potential cognitive gains of the preschool years? How can preschools maximize these gains so as to help reduce America’s enduring achievement gap?

In December, the Albert Shanker Institute (USA) released a new report, Preschool Curriculum: What’s In It for Children and Teachers.  The report synthesizes the best research on how young children learn in the domains of language, literacy, mathematics, and science and discusses the implications for improving preschool education. It suggests that early, age-appropriate instruction in these academic domains can have large, long-lasting effects on preschool children’s social and cognitive skills. Moreover, aggressive, expanded instruction in these domains may yield economic benefits by reducing the learning disparities between rich and poor children that predate preschool and escalate through elementary and into middle school.

Preschool Curriculum: What’s In It for Children and Teachers provides detailed, research-driven recommendations for what preschool-aged children should be learning in the following academic domains.

Oral Language: According to the ASI report, in order for pre-K programs to help close the academic achievement gap, oral language must be a primary focus. A study by Hart and Risley, “The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3,” found that 3 year-olds who grew up in poverty possessed half the vocabulary of their middle-class peers. This vocabulary gap remained five years later at age 9. Thus, the amount of dialogue between preschool children and caregivers can be seen as a key determinant of instructional quality. Reading aloud about a broad range of topics and active classroom discussions should be used to help build children’s vocabulary and develop their background knowledge. Among the accomplishments preschoolers should master are a range of listening and speaking skills that help train students for classroom participation in elementary school and conversation with both peers and adults.

Literacy: According to the ASI report, literacy development begins at birth and early experiences with literacy have lasting effects as children develop the attitudes, knowledge, and skills that prepare them to become readers and writers. In addition to developing the rich vocabulary and broad background knowledge that they will need to comprehend texts, preschool students should be taught how to hear and manipulate the sounds in oral language (phonological awareness) and to name and recognize letters of the alphabet so that, eventually, they can put it all together by matching sounds with letters of the alphabet. Also, children should gain an understanding of the conventions of print, such as how to turn pages and in which direction to read.

Mathematics: As with language and pre-reading skills, children who grow up in poverty tend to enter school already lagging behind their middle-class peers in developing key mathematics knowledge and skills—a gap which can foreshadow later academic struggles. Although educators once wondered whether mathematics instruction was appropriate for pre-K children, research now indicates that children are “predisposed” to learn simple mathematics as early as infancy. In pre-K, teachers can help children to build on this natural predisposition through instruction, games, and hands-on activities that focus on five major areas of mathematics: number and operation, algebra, geometry, measurement, and data analysis and collection.

Science: Young children are naturally curious about the world, and they regularly ask “why” and “how” questions that logically lead to scientific inquiry. Pre-K science can capitalize on children’s natural desire to discover new information and explore new ideas through guided activities and free exploration using science tools and materials. According to the ASI report, a strong pre-K program should help children develop science knowledge in physical science, life science, and earth science. Teachers can and should lead scientific queries, introduce science vocabulary, and integrate science with mathematics and literacy. Science should also be hands-on with students, using magnets, magnifying glasses, rulers, timers, and other instruments.

Parents: As the first and most important teachers in any preschooler’s life, parents help children to develop academically through a range of activities such as modeling reading behavior, engaging in extended conversations, asking open-ended questions, finding books on a wide variety of topics to read aloud, playing rhyming games, explaining new vocabulary, and turning everyday experiences (such as shopping and baking) into opportunities for mathematical and scientific play. In this regard, Preschool Curriculum: What’s In It for Children and Teachers is also a resource to the parents of preschoolers, including ideas on toys, books, math manipulatives, and science materials that can help foster learning.

Click here to download a copy of the report.

The Albert Shanker Institute, named in honor of the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to three themes—children's education, unions as advocates for quality, and freedom of association in the public life of democracies. Its mission is to generate ideas, foster candid exchanges, and promote constructive policy proposals related to these themes.