Pre-K Essential Content

Essential Content

group of children doing circle time with teacher

Guiding Question: Are All Students Working With Content Aligned to the Appropriate Standards for Their Subject and Grade?

Ensure that all students are working with content aligned to the appropriate standards for their subject area and grade. Each content area listed includes a summary of the priority standards that students should be able to demonstrate school readiness by the end of Pre-K. These prioritized items are considered foundational understandings that students will build upon in Pre-K and beyond.

young child reading book at a table

The California Preschool/Transitional Kindergarten Learning Foundations (PTKLF) outline key knowledge and skills that most children ages three to five and a half years old can achieve when provided with the kinds of interactions, instruction, and environments that research has shown to promote early learning and development. The foundations can provide preschool educators and families with a clear understanding of the wide range of knowledge and skills that children typically attain when given the benefits of a high-quality preschool program.

Priority Standards

What students will know, what students will do, and what thinking skills students will develop to apply and transfer understandings that endure within the discipline, leverage deeper understandings, and/or support readiness for success at the next grade level. These are the standards that should anchor and drive instruction.

 

Signature Elements

The practices, strategies, and routines at the core of teaching and learning within the content area/discipline.

Pre-K Standards

This is the list of Pre-K standards found on the Desired Results Developmental Profile. They represent understandings that endure within the discipline, leverage deeper understandings within the content area, and/or support readiness for success at the next grade level.

Social and Emotional Development
  • Explores environment to learn about people, things, and events
  • Develops strategies in regulating feelings
  • Persists in mastering new and challenging activities
  • Able to share space and materials with others
  • Describes characteristics of self
  • Communicates ideas about why one has a feeling
  • Engages in cooperative play with others
Language and Literacy Development
  • Shows understanding of a variety of phrases and sentences
  • Carries out familiar multi-step tasks
  • Produces sentences with nouns and verbs
  • Participates in read alouds, songs, and rhyming games
  • Understands details of texts read aloud
  • Tracks print left to right and page to page in a book
  • Demonstrates awareness of letters, words, and syllables
  • Identifies 10 or more letters
  • Writes first name
English Language Development
  • Shows understanding of multiple words, phrases and concepts in English
  • Communicates in English using sentences
  • Uses a variety of words and phrases in English
  • Identifies 10 or more letters in English
Math
  • Sorts objects into two or more groups by size and by color
  • Counts objects 1-10
  • Uses counting to add or subtract one or two objects
  • Identifies differences in size, length, weight of two or more objects
  • Creates repeating patterns with 2 or more elements
  • Identifies several shapes
Science
  • Observes objects and events of interest in the environment, makes simple predictions about them, and checks the predictions
  • Records information in simple ways (e.g., drawings, models, words dictated to an adult) about observations or investigations
  • Demonstrates awareness of basic needs and processes that are unique to living things (e.g., need for water and food; change and growth)
  • Offers possible explanations for why certain actions or behaviors result in specific effects
History and Social Science
  • Communicates about past events and future events, but is sometimes unclear about how far in the past they happened or how far in the future they will happen
  • Recognizes changes in familiar environments or in the people associated with them (e.g., a new adult in the classroom)
  • Demonstrates simple understanding that people tend to environments of plants and animals in caring for them (e.g., keeping cages clean, putting plants in the sun) 
  • Uses appropriate words and actions to express desires in some conflict situations, often seeking adult assistance to resolve conflict 
  • Carries out group expectations during extended activities, needing adult reminders to follow expectations from beginning to end
Physical Development
  • Changes movement in relation to people or objects 
  • Writes with a pencil or crayon using pincer hand position
  • Uses two or more sequential movements to move objects
  • Moves objects using both hands doing different movements
Health
  • Follows basic safety practices on own in familiar environments, with occasion adult reminders
  • Carries out most steps of familiar hygiene routines, with occasional reminders of when or how to do them
  • Serves self or others by scooping or pouring from containers
  • Dresses self, but still need assistance with parts of clothing that are particularly challenging (e.g., buttons, fasteners, zippers)
  • Demonstrates knowledge of the characteristics of a variety of foods
Visual and Performing Arts
  • Creates two dimensional and three-dimensional representations of things; and Experiments with detail or color
  • Engages in extended segments of musical activities initiated by others, by making musical sounds using voice, body, or instruments
  • Portrays a character with some detail when contributing to an improvised drama based on a story, song, or poem, or Contributes to dialogue or ideas about a plot in response to adult’s suggestions
  • Tries out a variety of movements through space, with some body control and awareness, in response to music, rhythms, others’ movements, or adults’ cues

 

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This page was last updated on December 18, 2024