Frog Street Pre-K - Criterion 1.2
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Criterion 1.2: Diverse Learners
Curriculum materials include adaptations, modifications, scaffolds, and individual student supports.
Indicator 1.2a
Curriculum materials support teachers with adapting the curriculum to support students’ needs, interests, and developmental stages.
Frog Street Pre-K materials meet expectations for supporting teachers in adapting the curriculum (1.2a).
The materials provide tools and strategies that enable teachers to tailor instruction to children’s developmental stages, interests, and learning needs, and that support diverse learners. Weekly lessons include a range of modifications and accommodations to ensure participation for all learners. Differentiation for varying skill levels is embedded within lessons, along with targeted adaptations for children with special needs (purple call-outs) and Dual/English Language Learners (pink call-outs). Language Support Strategy Cards guide intentional instruction that supports DLLs, ELLs, and children with special needs. Differentiation is operationalized within daily lesson structures. Literacy and Math Small Group lessons include recurring Support and Challenge boxes that allow teachers to adjust task demands, pacing, scaffolding, and complexity based on children’s needs and readiness (Welcome Guide, pp. 27-28). Additional resources to support differentiation, including the Differentiated Instruction Book and AIM Observational Assessment Books, are available for purchase.
Materials include tools and strategies to support differentiated instruction in the following areas:
Strategy Cards that often outline progressions of skills (e.g., patterns), which can support formative assessment and help teachers identify next instructional steps for individual learners.
The Welcome Guide (pp. 94–109) outlines cultural responsiveness, language supports, strategies for children with special needs, and the assessments included weekly in each domain.
Visual call-outs embedded within lessons, such as purple call-outs for special needs adaptations (e.g., “Choose just three cards from the sequence to help children understand what comes first, next, and last”) and pink call-outs for dual-language learners (e.g., using sign language on Photo Cards to connect actions with vocabulary like push and dump; Theme 5, p. 17).
Small-group scaffolding strategies, including guided support during literacy instruction (Theme 4, pp. 20–21), along with the use of digital stories, songs, and strategy cards to address common errors. While these supports are actionable, extensions are often surface-level rather than designed to promote deeper or sustained learning (Theme 9, pp. 20–21).
Differentiation boxes that offer support and challenge suggestions (for every literacy and math lesson), such as in Theme 6 (Teacher Guide, p. 16, 20-21, where teachers are encouraged to work individually with a child to model onset and rime, while the challenge option suggests practicing the same skill with a peer.
Overall, Frog Street Pre-K demonstrates effective support for teachers in adapting instruction to meet children’s diverse needs, interests, and developmental stages. The materials include a variety of embedded supports, such as differentiation within daily lessons, targeted adaptations for children with special needs and dual language learners, and strategy cards that guide instructional decision-making. Small-group structures, visual call-outs, and support-and-challenge suggestions provide teachers with practical ways to adjust instruction and scaffold learning.
Indicator 1.2b
Curriculum materials provide adaptations and supports for children with disabilities.
Frog Street Pre-K materials partially meet expectations for providing adaptations and supports for children with disabilities (1.2b).
The Welcome Guide (pp. 99-110) provides guidance on supporting children with diverse needs in “Meeting the Needs of Diverse Classrooms”, including targeted strategies for hearing impairments, visual impairments, cognitive challenges, communication disorders, autism, emotional disorders, and sensory needs. Some of these strategies include adaptations to materials to provide greater access. These supports are reinforced through purple call-outs embedded in the Teacher Guides at the point of instruction.
Photo cards include sign language and multimodal supports. Frog Street card components include photographs across Vocabulary Cards, Photo Cards, compound-word cards, sound cards, sequencing cards, letter wall cards, and cut-apart puzzles (Welcome Guide, page 14).
Practice centers, communication supports, and Support and Challenge structures provide recurring opportunities for individualized scaffolding (Welcome Guide, pp. 18, 25, 27-28).
Practice centers are identified as contexts for observation, support, and adaptation during child-initiated exploration (Welcome Guide, pp. 83-86).
Delayed motor development adaptation where teachers can add a clothespin to each book page, which gives the child a handle to hold when turning pages (Welcome Guide p. 104).
Environmental design guidance supports accessibility through words and pictures, organization for independent access, and semi-private areas for regulation and participation (Welcome Guide, p. 85).
Purple call-outs appear throughout each theme and lesson, primarily in small-group settings, offering supports for children with special needs (e.g., Theme 1, p. 40).
Differentiated instruction “blue boxes” provide scaffolds to support or challenge learners. Supports are more frequently referenced in small-group contexts.
Digital resources such as videos, listening libraries, music videos, and digital stories are provided.
Some lesson-specific adaptations are provided. In Theme 1, Teacher Guide (p. 75), green buttons are removed from an activity to accommodate children who may have difficulty distinguishing between green and blue. One example in Theme 2, Teacher Guide (p. 74), the special needs adaptation says to provide a 5-section egg carton for one-to-one counting, and that children with visual challenges will require larger counters.
Overall, Frog Street Pre-K materials include a moderate range of resources and supports to address the needs of children with disabilities. The Welcome Guide provides some strategies for supporting a variety of needs, reinforced through embedded structures such as purple call-outs, differentiated instruction prompts, and practice centers. Multimodal resources, including photo cards, sign language supports, and digital materials, further support access and engagement, and environmental design guidance promotes accessibility and participation. The materials include some adaptations and supports; however, their integration and level of detail vary, and implementation guidance is not always clearly specified. Adaptations are often presented as general supports, rather than explicit opportunities for student support. Some actionable adaptations are provided in the Welcome Guide, but are less prominent in the teaching guides. The materials include some supports for students with disabilities, but vary in how they are described and applied across instruction, and could be strengthened by including references to alternative formats or accessibility features.
Indicator 1.2c
Curriculum materials provide support for multilingual learners to facilitate language acquisition and content comprehension.
Frog Street Pre-K materials partially meet expectations for supporting multilingual learners (1.2c).
The Welcome Guide provides some guidance on supporting multilingual learners, including translanguaging practices, comprehension checks, visual cues, and structured language development strategies embedded in daily instruction (Welcome Guide, pp. 58-59; pp. 96-98). Pink call-outs for multilingual learners appear directly within lessons to indicate instructional adjustments. (e.g., Teacher Guide 4, pp. 23, 36, 77). The materials also include letter cards, compound-word cards, strategy cards, vocabulary cards, posters, and English & Spanish music (Welcome Guide, pp. 12-14).
Families are encouraged to support language and cultural connections through activities such as translating the weekly vocabulary word (Welcome Guide, pp. 94–95), contributing cultural artifacts (Theme 2, Teacher Guide, p. 17), sharing name origins connected to The Name Jar (Theme 4, p. 17), and discussing how celebrations differ among families (Theme 9, p.95).
The Welcome Guide provides information about language supports and early proficiency stages (pre-production, early production, speech emergence (p.96).
Some bilingual resources are present, including English/Spanish Photo Cards (e.g., iguana card with English and Spanish labels, Theme 1, pp. 11, 18) and select books available in both languages. Weekly newsletters can be translated into multiple languages. Cultural awareness call-outs (blue) appear two to four times per unit (e.g., Theme 5, p. 38),
Some instructional scaffolds, such as pink call-outs, Total Physical Response (TPR) strategies (Theme 4, pp. 23, 36, 77), think-alouds (Theme 9, Teacher Guide, p. 16), and visual cues (Theme 4, Teacher Guide, pp. 16, 34, 64, 75, 86, 95) are present.
Vocabulary supports include sentence stems and Photo Card prompts (Theme 3, Teacher Guide, p. 21; Theme 4, Teacher Guide, pp. 43, 88; Theme 7, Teacher Guide, p. 16).
Occasional opportunities exist to leverage home languages, such as counting in other languages (Theme 3, Teacher Guide, p. 22) or saying “thank you” in children’s home languages (Theme 3, Teacher Guide, p. 21), but these practices are isolated and not reinforced across lessons or routines.
Overall, Frog Street Pre-K sometimes supports multilingual learners in strengthening language development and enhancing content understanding through strategies, cultural connections, and bilingual resources. The materials include embedded scaffolds, opportunities for family connection, and guidance in the Welcome Guide that provide a foundation for supporting multilingual learners. Additionally, language development goals are not clearly defined in the materials, and the materials would be strengthened by more consistent and clearly defined supports for multilingual learners across the curriculum.