Every Child Ready - Criterion 2.3

Every Child Ready materials meet expectations for supporting receptive and expressive language development (2.3a).

Multiple lessons for read-alouds, flexible small groups, and centers are directly connected to language comprehension standards. Scaffolds, sentence stems, and explicit instruction support answering questions and participating in conversational turn-taking, with opportunities to extend these skills across the day, including mealtimes.

A dedicated standard on receptive language connects to a wide range of lessons and activities. Flexible small groups include listening-comprehension games such as “Move the Pom Poms,” where children follow directions like “Put the white pom first” to demonstrate understanding. Art studio and gross motor activities also include structured listening tasks with guided steps and optional visuals. 

Research-based strategies, narration, back-and-forth conversations, feedback loops, open-ended questioning, and repeated vocabulary are consistently embedded. These appear in read-alouds (e.g., Work It, Little Vehicle!), in Centers Facilitation Guides (e.g., Unit 4’s Pottery Studio in Dramatic Play), and in flexible small groups. For example, in “Playing with Vehicles,” teachers ask open-ended questions (“Where are you driving?”) and recast children’s responses (“You are driving the car. Say ‘I drive the car.’”), directly supporting oral language growth.

A robust variety of activities, routines, and structures reinforces oral language development. Turn-and-talk and partner-share routines appear in read-alouds, morning meetings, and small groups. In a morning meeting from Unit 2 Week 4, children tell a partner how they would feel in response to scenarios read aloud by the teacher. Centers and daily songs further support language use. In the Unit 3 Sculpting a Building Art Studio, teachers prompt vocabulary (“smooshy clay”) and model language-action connections (“I am rolling the clay into a ball…”). Songs incorporate call-and-response or match language to action steps during transitions and routines.

Language-support strategies are embedded in every instructional routine with clear examples. Materials encourage open-ended “how” and “why” questions (“Why should we brush our teeth every day?”) and promote sustained exchanges through repeated feedback loops. Lessons intentionally support extended conversation, prompting teachers to facilitate two or more back-and-forth turns with questions like those featured in Unit 5’s Read Aloud, Bein’ With You This Way. Peer conversation is scaffolded across units and culminates in more complex small-group discussions, such as those in Unit 8’s How to Wash a Woolly Mammoth.

Overall, Every Child Ready materials integrate comprehensive, research-aligned oral language supports across all instructional contexts. The materials consistently embed scaffolds, intentional teacher prompts, and structured opportunities for children to practice receptive and expressive language, ensuring robust development throughout the school day.

Every Child Ready materials meet expectations for supporting vocabulary (2.3b). 

Vocabulary appears in each thematic unit overview and in lesson materials for read-alouds, small groups, and learning labs. In some lessons, words aligned with lesson standards are highlighted in the same color as the standard to draw attention to them. For example, in Theme 6’s Read Aloud How to Make an Awesome Cake, where recipe, batter, and cup are marked alongside measurement standards. 

The materials often supply child-friendly definitions. In unit overviews, words marked with a “+” include definitions, and in Themes 7 and 10, all listed words contain them. Camouflage is defined as “when an animal uses color or shape to blend in and protect itself,” while reflection is “an image you can see in a mirror, glass, or water.” Read-aloud vocabulary lists follow the same structure.

Centers Facilitation Handout provides clear vocabulary guidance for play-based contexts. For example, in Unit 2 Week 4, the Construction Zone Center highlights greenheart tree, important, and papa, with prompts such as “Describe the tree. What does the rope-like substance look like? Why is the tree important to the boy and his papa?” Similar support appears in Unit 8’s Painting a Dinosaur center and Unit 9’s Exploration Center.

The materials include a 5-Step Vocabulary Protocol: 

1. Say the word

2. Provide a child-friendly definition with a visual, if possible

3. Children repeat a word

4. Provide an example and a non-example

5. Children practice the word in context

Opportunities to practice vocabulary in context, Step 5 of the Five-Step Vocabulary Protocol, are regularly integrated. In Theme 9, Week 4, after defining the word 'snowsuit,' children pretend to put one on during The Snowy Day. In Unit 3’s Art Easel, children give a “tour” of their buildings using terms such as porch, roof, door, and windows. Vocabulary practice also appears in responses to the question of the day, such as Theme 7’s “How can we help endangered animals?”

Vocabulary learning is primarily supported through visuals and some acting out. In Theme 7, 5 of 13 vocabulary words include photographs, and in Theme 10, 11 of 13 do. Picture Word Cards and additional resources, such as Theme 6’s Emergency Cards, offer further visual support. Acting out appears in lessons like Unit 6, Week 2’s "Let’s Cooperate!" where students demonstrate the word trade. 

Materials provide opportunities to explore word relationships. In Unit 2, Week 4’s Calabash Capacity Exploration Center, children compare calabashes to other objects that hold water. In Unit 6, Week 1’s How to Make an Awesome Cake?, students compare cups and teaspoons and discuss why a cup of salt was not used. However, related words are sometimes presented separately, such as snow, snowsuit, and snowball in The Snowy Day. 

Materials provide structured activities designed to foster vocabulary development. In Unit 5 Week 3, vanish, friendship, and kind are introduced in Stick and Stone, and children later identify kind acts and create “kindness soup.” Vocabulary also carries across routines; in the same week, children practice dance and stop during Gross Motor, and in Unit 9 Week 4, they create snowscapes after reading The Snowy Day.

Vocabulary lists in unit overviews consistently include common and content-specific words, as well as some academic vocabulary. For example, Theme 6 lists safe, rest, exercise, and content words like cavity, skeleton, and muscles, but no academic terms. Academic language appears more often within lessons, such as uppercase letters and rhyme in Theme 6 Week 1 Morning Meeting, or measure in How to Make an Awesome Cake. The Learning Lab includes additional academic words such as compare (Unit 3 Week 1) and experiment and hypothesis (Unit 1 Week 4).

Overall, the Every Child Ready materials embed clear routines, child-friendly definitions, and frequent opportunities to practice vocabulary across instructional contexts. The consistent use of the Five-Step Vocabulary Protocol, visual supports, and play-based applications allows children to encounter and use new words meaningfully throughout the day and across themes. Vocabulary instruction is reinforced through read-alouds, centers, learning labs, and routines, supporting both content-specific and emerging academic language. 

Every Child Ready materials meet expectations for supporting children in recognizing and manipulating sounds and words (2.3c). 

The materials support students in developing phonological awareness and phonemic awareness through standards broken into learning goals that connect to a variety of lessons. Students learn phonemic awareness during flexible small groups, where they may use sound boxes to segment words (FSG. Segment Two Phoneme Words). They also develop these skills during morning meeting through the daily “Super Sounds” activity. “Super Sounds” is a dedicated literacy routine designed to build phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge. Each week, teachers target specific phonological awareness skills. Teachers use consistent language and coordinated gestures to help children identify, blend, and segment sounds in spoken words. Super Sounds introduces and practices skills in a predictable, intentional weekly sequence. On Mondays, teachers introduce the phonological awareness skill; on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, children practice it; and on Fridays, teachers review it.

The Super Sounds Overview includes a PK4 scope and sequence for phonological awareness:

• Units 1-2: Compound Words, Syllables, and Rhyme

• Unit 3: Compound Words, Syllables, Rhyme, Isolating Sounds

• Units 4-5: Syllables, Rhyme, Isolating Sounds, Onset-Rime

• Unit 6: Rhyme, Isolating Sounds, Onset-Rime, Phonemes

• Units 7-10: Isolating Sounds, Onset-Rime, Phonemes

“Super Sound” routines include isolating sounds with and without letter cards (Unit 6 Week 2: Identify and Produce Letter Sounds), blending sounds (Unit 9 Week 2: Blending /at/ words), and segmenting words into phonemes (Unit 7 Week 4: Segmenting Phoneme Puzzles). Additional opportunities appear in centers, read-aloud lessons, and question of the day prompts, such as Unit 10 Week 1’s “Tell me a word that begins with the same sound as planet.”

The materials support teaching a range of phonological awareness tasks, including blending and segmenting compound words, syllables, and onset-rime units, as well as isolating, matching, and producing rhymes. These tasks are primarily taught during the morning meeting and in flexible small groups, with reinforcement in select read-alouds and centers. For example, in morning meeting (Unit 2 Week 4), students copy hand motions to segment the compound word raincoat. Later, in Unit 5 Week 2, students generate rhyming words to match picture cards during a morning meeting activity.

Play-based practice is built into lessons that support phonemic awareness. In flexible small groups and morning meetings, children engage in games to isolate sounds and blend phonemes. In T1.19.FSG: Isolating Sounds. The teacher plays “I Spy,” prompting students to stand by objects beginning with the target sound. A similar Initial sound hunt appears in Unit 6, Week 2 morning meeting. In Unit 7 Week 4, students manipulate phoneme puzzles to segment two-sound words such as tie. Teachers are also encouraged to extend this play into centers, for instance, by blending /k/, /a/, and/t/at the investigation location (Unit 7 Week 4).

Materials include varied ways for students to play with and manipulate sounds, words, and language. Through games and structured tasks, students engage with phonological skills in meaningful contexts. In Flexible Small Group T1.21, children pretend to shop and create rhymes for the photo cards they select. In Centers, they sort play food and break words into onset and rime. Writing activities also reinforce phonological skills across Question of the Day, Centers, and Journaling. In Unit 7, Week 2’s Question of the Day on endangered animals, students are reminded that “words are made of letters,” and teachers are encouraged to accept phonetically plausible attempts rather than correct spelling. In Unit 8 Week 4, during the creation of “Dinosaur Fact Books,” children isolate initial sounds when labeling drawings—for example, “What sound do you hear at the beginning of footprint? What letter makes the /f/ sound? ‘f’—curve and down, across.”

Overall, the Every Child Ready materials offer a comprehensive, developmentally appropriate approach to phonological and phonemic awareness. Through consistent routines, varied instructional settings, and intentionally embedded practice across daily activities, students receive multiple opportunities to listen to, play with, and manipulate the sounds of spoken language. The integration of these skills across morning meeting, flexible small groups, centers, read-alouds, and writing experiences demonstrates a coherent structure that reinforces early sound awareness. 

Every Child Ready materials meet expectations for supporting children’s comprehension. (2.3e). 

The materials include a broad collection of literary and informational texts that span key early learning domains. The English language collection contains 333 texts, including 246 literary texts and 87 informational texts, with a strong emphasis on literary texts to support read-alouds, oral language development, and engagement with narrative structure. Informational texts build early background knowledge in content areas. Over two-thirds of the titles are high-quality trade books by well-known children’s authors, including Mo Willems, Eric Carle, Gail Gibbons, and Eve Bunting. The collection balances fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and features age-appropriate storylines grounded in children’s real-world experiences with friendship, family, routines, and classroom life.

The authorship and illustration data in this collection indicate that the majority of texts are created by White authors and illustrators, with fewer contributions from Black/African American, Latinx/Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, and multiracial creators. Representation among protagonists is somewhat more varied, with many texts explicitly identifying a protagonist of a race/ethnicity other than White, most frequently Black/African American, followed by Latinx/Hispanic characters, and more limited representation of Asian/Pacific Islander, multiracial, and Native American identities. Many additional texts list the protagonist’s race/ethnicity as unknown or not specified, which limits a full understanding of representation. Across the collection, protagonists include boys, girls, families, and classroom communities, and the texts emphasize common early childhood themes such as social-emotional development, identity, relationships, and everyday experiences, making them accessible to preschool learners while offering some opportunities for diverse representation.

Read-aloud opportunities are varied across content areas, using both literary and informational texts to support learning in math, science, social studies, social-emotional development, and the arts. These texts introduce domain-specific vocabulary and concepts, including measurement, sequencing, scientific processes, and community roles, while supporting comprehension and discussion through structured routines. The collection also includes texts that reflect a range of cultural backgrounds, traditions, and experiences. Some texts include examples of ability diversity and varied gender roles, contributing to inclusive representation, though representation varies across the collection.

In addition to the English-language collection, the materials include a Spanish-language PreK collection of 202 texts. Many of these are Spanish editions or adaptations aligned to the same instructional units as the English materials and mirror the structure and instructional purpose of the English text set. Together, the English and Spanish collections provide consistent access to narrative and informational texts that support early literacy, content learning, and engagement, while offering a partial yet representative representation of the diversity of children and families.

Comprehension of narrative and informational texts is intentionally incorporated at multiple instructional levels to ensure children have frequent, meaningful opportunities to engage with and understand text. The read-aloud component occurs for 15–20 minutes each day during whole-group instruction. Each book is read three times across consecutive lessons, providing multiple opportunities for children to deepen their understanding of story structure, vocabulary, and content. Daily read-alouds explicitly support comprehension through before, during, and after reading questions and prompts in the lesson plans. Language and Literacy flexible small groups occur four times per week in Units 3–10 and include lessons. The flexible small group progression includes story structure and narrative retell skills. Narrative and informational comprehension skills are reinforced daily through play-based activities and facilitated conversations in Centers. 

Overall, Every Child Ready materials offer a consistently high-quality, developmentally appropriate, and representative text collection that enriches vocabulary, strengthens comprehension, and exposes children to a range of cultures, abilities, and content areas.

Every Child Ready materials meet expectations for supporting children’s expression of ideas (2.3f). 

Children are provided with ongoing opportunities to express ideas through drawing and writing in connection with thematic concepts and essential questions. In the recommended daily schedule, children participate in both the journaling and the question of the day components every day. The journaling component lasts approximately 15-25 minutes, and the question of the day component lasts approximately 5 minutes. The daily learning lab component often includes writing. Writing and drawing are reinforced daily through intentional writing center activities and other embedded opportunities, where children practice fine-motor, emergent writing, and alphabet knowledge. 

Students engage in purposeful writing experiences that develop understanding of writing as a tool for communication. For example, the PreK standards explicitly address various purposes for writing, from communicating thoughts and describing experiences to storytelling, which is consistently reinforced through activities such as Unit 10 learning lab – Design a Playground and Unit 5 Week 3 Journal – Tell us about your favorite rice dish. Other examples include writing letters to a pen pal, writing shopping lists, and writing in response to reading. These experiences clearly align with the intent of helping children understand writing for different purposes and genres.

The materials include a well-sequenced approach to developing writing skills through modeled, interactive, and scaffolded writing assignments. Teachers are guided to pay attention to the stages of writing development, using resources such as the Stages of Writing Development planner and the Science of Reading supplementary guide to plan instruction that meets students at their developmental writing stage. Examples such as Unit 6 Week 2 journaling – write and draw about your bedtime routine demonstrate explicit teacher modeling of sound-letter correspondence and word formation, while scaffolding occurs through flexible small-group and individual conferencing in the journaling lessons.

Opportunities for sharing compositions are embedded in the author’s chair, which is part of all journaling lessons, promoting reflection, oral expression, and meaningful discussion of students’ written ideas. The author's chair is introduced in Unit 1 through a dedicated lesson, and teachers are also given a tool to monitor which children are participating in the author's chair to ensure every child gets a turn. Examples in Unit 7 Week 2 and Unit 8 Week 1 show consistent question prompts tied to the writing topic that invite children to explain and expand on their writing, reinforcing writing as a communicative act within a community of learners.

Writing and drawing experiences are intentionally integrated throughout daily routines and learning contexts. Lessons such as Unit 2 learning lab, observing and drawing clouds, and Unit 10 learning lab, design a playground connect writing to inquiry and creative expression, ensuring self-expression through drawing and pre-writing activities like talking through ideas, drawing, and acting them out.

The materials also lay a strong foundation in emergent spelling. Teacher guidance in the Writing Stages of Development planner outlines a three-step progression of phonetic spelling, while journaling lessons, especially in later units, emphasize phonetic spelling strategies. Children are encouraged to represent sounds with letters and develop confidence in their early spelling attempts.

Routines and resources supporting early writing are evident throughout the curriculum. Daily components consistently include journaling and writing centers, and targeted lessons in flexible small groups (such as the 40 lessons on name writing) provide structured progression from scribbling to forming uppercase and lowercase letters. These experiences collectively foster children’s ability to express ideas, experiment with writing, and develop fine motor and literacy skills in authentic, play-based contexts.

Overall, Every Child Ready materials provide consistent, developmentally appropriate, and well-structured support for children’s expression through drawing and writing. Daily journaling, question of the day, learning lab, and writing center experiences ensure frequent and meaningful opportunities for children to communicate ideas across contexts and purposes. Instruction is intentionally scaffolded through modeling, interactive writing, small-group support, and attention to stages of writing development, with strong emphasis on emergent spelling and phonetic representation. Embedded routines such as Author’s Chair reinforce writing as a communicative act within a classroom community. Together, these integrated structures and supports foster confidence, creativity, and foundational literacy skills while helping children understand writing as a purposeful tool for expression.