The first couple of weeks of a new school year are an opportunity for preschool teachers to set the stage for the rest of the school year, emphasizing the rules, routines and rituals much needed by our young children. It is also the time to find out about their interests and what is most exciting to them. That will set the base for our project based curriculum. While we discuss, explore, and research projects of interest with our children, we are teaching them fine and gross motor skills, social/emotional, language/communication and literacy, as well as cognitive skills. So in fact, it does not really matter what projects we work on, as long as they stimulate, excite, and motivate our learners.

 In order to decide which skills to teach and in what priority, we have to know where our students are on the developmental scale for the aforementioned skills. After our students have integrated into the classroom and routines, usually two to three weeks into the school year, and once the children have bonded with their teachers, we perform a developmental assessment for each child whose parents have authorized us to do so.

Once we determine the “weakest link” in each child, be it a certain level of the motor skills, language/communication and literacy skills, social/emotional skills, or cognitive skills, we then correlate the “weakest links” to the Child Development Standards issued by the Department of Education of the State of Florida. The result of this correlation is documented in a “standard skill map” for each classroom. Each skill map outlines all the “weak links” or weak areas to be worked on for all students in each classroom. In doing so, we focus on what each child needs to develop or acquire and master those skills by the end of the school year and we do it collectively, in a building block manner, for each classroom.

We then integrate in each lesson plan for each classroom the skills we need to focus on for the students of that classroom using the pre-determined projects that are of interest to them. In fact, we focus on the skills to be taught to strengthen the “weak links” into the design of the activities that will explore the students’ interests in the project based curriculum.

When we have succeeded in strengthening a “weak link” for each child, we start over again assessing for a new “weak link” and resetting the skill maps. We are continuously teaching with a purpose to develop all of our children’s skills, one “weak link” at a time.