Pre-K Curriculum

The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K is a research-based, whole-child, prekindergarten curriculum designed specifically to address the unique strengths and needs of children in the year before kindergarten.

After devoting the first six weeks of school to developing a strong, collaborative classroom community, the curriculum then guides teachers to lead children in six, long-term, project-based, hands-on investigations of topics that young children typically find interesting, such as light, cameras, and seeds.

The curriculum is grounded in 38 objectives for development and learning that research has shown to be the most highly correlated to success in elementary school and beyond. It leverages play-based experiences and developmentally appropriate routines to actively promote children’s knowledge, skills, and abilities across ten essential areas: social-emotional, physical, language, and cognitive development as well as content learning in literacy, mathematics, science and technology, social studies, the arts, and—for multilingual learners—English language acquisition.

The curriculum includes daily suggestions for ways that teachers can observe and document each child’s growing knowledge, skills, and abilities, and individualize instruction based on those observations. The result is a joyful, productive classroom where children develop the confidence, curiosity, and academic foundation they need to enter kindergarten prepared to succeed.

The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K is designed for children in the year before kindergarten—primarily four-year-olds and children who have recently turned five. The curriculum has been intentionally crafted to leverage the unique strengths and interests of children this age, to promote their readiness for kindergarten next year within a developmentally appropriate, play-based, joyful environment.

Programs serving a mix of three- and four-year-old children may find The Creative Curriculum for Preschool to be a better fit.

Both The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K and The Creative Curriculum for Preschool are comprehensive, research-based, whole-child curricula from Teaching Strategies, and they are grounded in the same set of 38 objectives for development and learning.

Both curricula describe a full 180 days of instruction, driven by long-term, project-based investigations of topics that young children typically find interesting. Each curriculum is built on a scope and sequence that is detailed enough to ensure research-based skill-building yet flexible enough to protect a teacher’s ability to be responsive to individual strengths and needs.

Furthermore, both The Creative Curriculum for Preschool and The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K offer teachers and administrators award-winning, time-saving digital tools that make planning a breeze and implementation a delight.

The curricula differ in several significant ways, however.

The Creative Curriculum for Preschool serves children aged three to five, with built-in adaptability for mixed-age classrooms. It is intended for use in programs with classrooms serving a range of ages, and for programs that choose to loop whole classrooms of children with the same teacher for multiple years.

In contrast, The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K, which promotes a focus on preparing children for kindergarten, is intended to serve children during the school year before their kindergarten entry—primarily children who are four years old or who have recently turned five. This version of The Creative Curriculum includes explicit, daily, small-group instruction in both essential mathematics and science-of-reading-based literacy skills.

If your program serves primarily four-year-old children in a Head Start setting or a public school or other state-funded setting focused on promoting kindergarten readiness, The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K was created for you. However, if your program serves a broader age range and operates in a private child care or family child care setting, The Creative Curriculum for Preschool is likely a better fit.

The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K is the only curriculum designed for and developed in partnership with educators and leaders across the nation, ensuring it meets the needs of teachers, children, and their families. The curriculum’s studies allow children to learn about topics they might experience as part of their everyday life, and allows their families to engage with their learning, and make every day occurrences, like a trip to the grocery store, an opportunity to share their learning. It is also the only pre-K curriculum with progressions of learning from birth through third grade allowing you to both observe, document, and individualize learning for children of all interests and ability levels.

Yes. The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K provides explicit, immersive literacy instruction grounded in the science of reading research findings.
The curriculum guides teachers in building the essential foundational early literacy skills that children need to be on track for achieving reading proficiency by third grade.

The curriculum describes a variety of experiences teachers will use to promote five research-based practices, aligned to the five pillars of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. These practices include engaging in conversations; guiding meaningful connections with books and stories; promoting functional literacy; providing daily, intentional instruction in discrete, early literacy skills; and building background knowledge and vocabulary.

The curriculum also provides ideas for how families can support and extend children’s literacy learning at home.

Program leaders who want to augment the curriculum’s broad-ranging oral language and literacy instruction with something that focuses intently on building alphabet knowledge and early phonics skills, can pair The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K with Kickstart Literacy. Kickstart Literacy is our supplemental early literacy curriculum designed especially for the unique needs of children in the year before kindergarten entry.

Yes. The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K addresses mathematics through a combination of daily focused, teacher-led instruction in discrete skills, and an environment, schedule, and project-based approach to learning that deliberately encourage child-led, practical application of mathematical reasoning throughout the pre-K day.

From exploring the geometry of building with blocks, to measuring ingredients for a cooking project, to counting supplies as they plan an art project or set a table in their dramatic play, to collecting and analyzing their responses to the question of the day, children are almost perpetually engaged in some kind of mathematical reasoning.

The curriculum’s Intentional Teaching Experiences in mathematics guide teachers to address one or more of the components of early mathematics each day through focused instruction in discrete skills, in a formula suggested by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM): number and operations, 30% of the time: geometry and spatial sense 30%; measurement 20%; data analysis 10%; and patterns, 10%.

Yes. The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K includes many built-in tools and resources to help teachers individualize instruction to best support all children, including those with disabilities, across public school, private school, and child care settings.

The curriculum utilizes a strengths-based, Universal Design for Learning approach. The curriculum describes how to create a physical environment and provide learning experiences that all children in a classroom can participate in, at a just-right level. It also makes it possible for children to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities in ways that make sense to them.

The Creative Curriculum is grounded in a developmentally appropriate approach, informed by research-based progressions that describe children’s development and learning from birth through third grade. These progressions give teachers, specialists, and therapists a detailed picture of children’s development for the first eight years of life, empowering them to promote individualized instruction aligned with a child’s IEP goals.

Yes. The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K is a fully bilingual curriculum. All digital resources, including the eight Teaching Guides that describe 180 days of instruction, are available in both English and Spanish. Resources have been designed to intentionally support children’s learning in each language.

Teaching Guides and Intentional Teaching Experiences—which describe short, play-based activities designed to promote discrete skills—include guidance specifically crafted to promote the development and learning of children who are multilingual learners.

All titles included in the Children’s Book Collection are either fully bilingual or available in both English and Spanish.

Materials describing specific learning experiences are transadapted rather than simply translated, meaning idioms, cultural references, and examples are adapted so they are meaningful in each language rather than being translated literally, word for word, from English to Spanish.

Study topics reflect experiences and incorporate materials that encourage children to draw on their background experiences, home language, and family heritage, such as playing percussion instruments, planting seeds, or shopping for their family’s food at a grocery store.

All of the digital resources that comprise The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K—including the curriculum’s eight Teaching Guides that describe 180 days of instruction—are available in both English and Spanish. The print resources of the Spanish Companion Kit include the child-facing print materials in Spanish: children’s books (30), 3-Step Instruction Cards (21), Letter Cards (54), Phonogram Cards (30), and Mega Minutos (135).

The Spanish Companion Kit is an optional add-on when purchasing the digital resources of The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K and is not sold on its own. A separate fee applies for purchasing the Spanish Companion Kit. 

The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K is grounded in a set of 38 objectives that describe the knowledge, skills, and abilities that research indicates are most closely related to success in kindergarten and beyond.

The daily resources of The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K, such as Teaching Guides and Intentional Teaching Experiences, include embedded guidance for observing children’s development and learning related to these objectives, as each child demonstrates what they know and can do, during everyday routines and experiences. A celebration of learning at the conclusion of each long-term study gives teachers further opportunities to observe authentic demonstrations the knowledge and skills children have acquired throughout the study.

Teachers implementing The Creative Curriculum who also use the Teaching Strategies assessment system known as GOLD, are empowered to easily document their observations and transform that documentation into a variety of meaningful reports. The reports are purposefully designed to facilitate teachers’ understanding of children’s progress over time and their sharing of that information with children’s families.

The resources of The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K include a wide variety of built-in supports for implementation, including hundreds of micro-learning videos intended to provide insight, tips, and suggestions, right when and where a teacher most needs them. Specific guidance is available throughout the curriculum to help teachers individualize learning experiences and meet the needs of all children, including those with special needs and children who are multilingual learners.

Teachers and leaders using The Creative Curriculum enjoy easy access to asynchronous, professional learning tutorials and an active, online learning community of more than 100,000 early childhood educators. This online community offers educators a dedicated space to ask and respond to questions, share ideas and success stories, and communicate directly with experts at Teaching Strategies.
Programs also have access to curated playlists of helpful videos, digital books, and activities that teachers can automatically share with families, to support and extend children’s learning at home.

Programs that choose to purchase the optional Professional Development Teacher Membership also have access to a 6-week rapid onboarding program for teachers; a similar program for specifically for administrators; customized question-and-answer forums; 24/7 access to more than 400 hours of asynchronous learning modules that offer IAECT CEUs* and meet course requirements for all CDA and CCDF training; and live, virtual classes and meet-ups, all year long.

Programs may also choose to purchase live, full-day, on-site trainings and live, half- or full-day virtual trainings, to further promote their educators’ professional learning. All trainings are led by members of our highly skilled and knowledgeable Professional Development Network, who will conduct a needs assessment with program leaders prior to any training, to better ensure each program’s unique needs are met.
Coach Memberships are available to provide direct support to instructional coaches and promote a program’s fidelity of implementation.

*Teaching Strategies is accredited by the International Association for Continuing Education and Training (IACET) and is accredited to issue the IACET CEU. 

No. The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K is not a word-for-word scripted program. It provides structured guidance and detailed daily plans, but teachers retain professional choice in how they deliver and adapt instruction. While a defined scope and sequence is provided for the entire year, the order in which its studies are taught is also flexible.

One of the many strengths of The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K is that it both offers 180 days of detailed daily plans—all of which teachers can add to their plans in just a few clicks—and supports teachers to individualize instruction and customize experiences to best align with the unique strengths, needs, and interests of the children they serve. Guidance within the curriculum offers many suggestions for ways that teachers can “make the curriculum their own” and better incorporate the expertise and talents of the children’s family members and the resources and heritage of their larger community.

The curriculum is a foundation, not a constraint, and teachers are encouraged to incorporate their professional expertise into their every day with children.

The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K includes access to The Creative Curriculum Cloud, a digital platform that gives teachers 24/7 access to the full library of curriculum resources in both English and Spanish. Teachers can easily plan for a week, a month, or the entire year, in just a few clicks; view and customize activities from the curriculum’s Daily Resources; assess children’s skills as they teach; and access a Digital Children’s Library of more than 100 titles that either they or the children can enjoy, with or without audio, through an embedded interactive e-reader.

The platform also generates family-friendly playlists of videos, digital books, and activities tied directly to classroom learning, and automatically sends them to families, who can easily engage in two-way communication through the multifunctional Teaching Strategies Family App. The app is available to families as a free download in both the Apple App Store and Google Play store.

Yes-The Creative Curriculum can work well in low-tech or low-bandwidth environments, and also with less tech-comfortable staff, because it includes both print and digital resources. For programs in low-tech environments, teacher can rely on print materials for day-to-day teaching and use the digital tools when connectivity is available for planning, access to an online professional learning community, courses, and more. Our digital platform, the Cloud, is intuitive and user friendly, so even less tech-comfortable staff find value in utilizing the resource.

Yes. The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K is aligned to early learning guidelines in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, as well as the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework.

This alignment means that programs can use The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K to demonstrate they are meeting their state’s early learning standards while still focusing on the individual needs of each child.

Specific alignment documents are available for every state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework.

Yes, The Creative Curriculum for Pre-K is an approved VPK curriculum in Florida and is 100% aligned to Florida Early Learning and Developmental Standards.

Yes, The Creative Curriculum for PreK and The Creative Curriculum for Preschool are both approved Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) curriculum in Colorado. Both solutions are “Cleared For Use” meaning that The Creative Curriculum is cleared for use in the 2026/2027 program year and does not need to be submitted for review.