In this 20-minute interview Linda Bevilacqua, President of the Core Knowledge Foundation, outlines indicators of kindergarten readiness and activities that you can do to help prepare your child for kindergarten. More…
Evaluate Your Preschool Program
The Preschool Snapshot: Implementation and Obsesrvation Checklists will guide a quality implementation of the Preschool Sequence. More…
Preschool Sequence Details
The Core Knowledge Preschool Sequence and Teacher Handbook is comprised of three integrated components:
Goals and Skills
Each developmental goal in the Preschool Sequence is comprised of a sequenced set of skills that lead to the goal. The skills are sequenced based on typical development paths and are organized in two levels—Level I skills, for typically developing three- and four-year-olds, and Level II skills for typically developing four- and five-year-olds.
Core Knowledge Content
The Preschool Sequence recommends specific rhymes, poems, fingerplays, stories, nonfiction, and artwork. These works represent a broad range of historical, scientific, and cultural topics, selected for their suitability in supporting the skills of the Preschool Sequence, and for their contributions to developing children's background knoweldge. Rich content knowledge equips children to better comprehend what they will read in the future. Reading comprehension is about much more than basic literacy skills. To comprehend, readers must understand the vocabulary and use content knowledge to connect what they read to existing knowledge.
Explicit Support for Oral Language
In the past decade, there has been a tremendous focus on early literacy skills. This focus often begins prior to preschool and continues through the early elementary grades. During this time, it is almost impossible to overemphisize the importance of oral language development and its impact on nearly every aspect of learning—including literacy and writing. To that end, there is a very intentional focus on oral language throughout the Preschool Sequence that includes "Language of Instruction" for each content area and a comprehensive set of oral language skills distributed throughout each content area.