“An extraordinarily well conceived and timely book. Seefeldt offers excellent concrete and practical strategies for dealing with standards along with the rationale and background knowledge needed to understand why the strategies make sense. This book is destined to become a staple for early childhood pre-service education and for practitioners in the field.”
—Dorothy S. Strickland, Samuel DeWitt Proctor Professor of Education, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

“Standard-setting itself, this volume is essential reading for all those who teach and care about the education and development of young children.”
—Sharon Lynn Kagan, Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Early Childhood and Family Policy, Teachers College, Columbia University

More and more teachers of young children are being asked to develop their curriculum according to standards. This essential resource will guide educators as they grapple with a plethora of issues, questions, and practices surrounding the use of standards in the early childhood classroom.

Carol Seefeldt—a well-known educator and bestselling author—offers teachers an overview of the standards movement; describes the status of standards in early education; presents the issues around the design and selection of standards; and provides practical strategies for effectively implementing standards with young children (preschool through the early primary grades).

This book provides both the background knowledge and a working understanding of standards to help teachers:

• Successfully judge and select standards.
• Design appropriate ways of using and working with standards.
• Develop appropriate assessment strategies.

Illustrated with children’s work, this “how to” guide:

• Provides practical illustrations of how standards can be used to benefit early childhood classrooms, including many sample activities.
• Demonstrates how to work with standards in the separate subject areas of the sciences, arts, language and literacy, mathematics, and social studies.
• Offers ideas for including all children, such as those with special needs and those just learning English.
• Describes a project, Children Study Their Play Yard, illustrating how thematic, standard-based, problem-solving learning can be integrated into the total curriculum.

Carol Seefeldt is a Professor Emerita of Human Development at the Institute for Child Study, University of Maryland, College Park and the editor of The Early Childhood Curriculum.