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NAEYC Standard 5
Using Content Knowledge to Build Meaningful Curriculum
Students prepared in early childhood degree programs use their knowledge of academic
disciplines to design, implement, and evaluate experiences that promote positive
development and learning for each and every young child. Students understand the
importance developmental domains and academic (or content) disciplines in an early
childhood curriculum. They know the essential concepts, inquiry tools, and structure of
content areas, including academic subjects, and can identify resources to deepen their
understanding. Students use their own knowledge and other resources to design implement,
and evaluate meaningful, challenging curricula that promote comprehensive developmental
and learning outcomes for every young child.
5a. Understanding content knowledge and resources in academic disciplines
5b. Knowing & using the central concepts, inquiry tools, & structures of content areas of
academic disciplines
5c. Using their own knowledge, appropriate early learning standards, & other resources to
design, implement, & evaluate meaningful, challenging, curricula for each child

All children learn differently, sometimes it is difficult to find a topic that

all children will be or become interested in. This allows the teacher a chance
to discover and learn about each of the childrens uniqueness. It is important
that majority of the class is interested and engaged, if a child (or few) is not,
then some critiquing needs to be done. There are many different factors to
be considered when making changes; it might be a few steps missing (or a
few too many) that need to be discovered in order to catch the uninterested
childs attention. If the child does not yet have an average attention span,
then some accommodations need to be created on the length of the activity.
This is done in hopes to present the child with an appropriate situation to
become interested instead of easily bored or distracted.
Before creating any of my lesson plans, I always referred to NAEYC
Standards. I would pick a specific standard in order to create the goal if one

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was not already created. This made the planning much easier and
appropriate for the children that would be participating in the activity. It also
ensured that the lesson being taught behind the activity was up to code and
appropriate according and thanks to NAEYC. Once the activities were
planned in depth, I checked back over them to make sure that they met the
goal of the standard, if not more than the one chosen. A well-planned activity
will be used to aid the development of more than just one of the
developmental domains and will hopefully involve all of the domains.
One of my lesson plans that I created based off of a book, was where
the children and teachers had to design a picture of a bug. To complete this
task, they were given the options to color, paint, and/or decorate it with arts
and crafts. At home, I created and painted a tree out of cardboard, it was
larger than me. Nineteen of the first corresponding parts of Velcro were
scattered across the tree and the next morning I brought it to the school.
After the bugs representing the children were dry, we cut them out and stuck
the corresponding piece of Velcro to the back of them. Then that morning, we
reread the Miss Spiders ABCs and talked about how there are swarms of
bugs. We discussed what a swarm is and how it is similar and different from
our classroom. Then, after the children were calm and displaying the
expectations, they were called on in twos to attach their bug to the
Classroom Swarm Tree. Once all the children had gone up and attached
their bug to the tree, some were sitting while others were standing and
looking at this big colorful tree that had a lot of bugs that were representing

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themselves and their classmates. One child asked why their mom and dad
was not up there, I explained that we could make a tree that has each childs
parents and siblings up there but we would need more room next time and to
have their parents create their own bug as well. Another child asked how
many us (bugs) were on the tree, so I turned it into a group counting
opportunity. After counting to nineteen, I explained how soon there will only
be eighteen bugs in our class swarm. This lead to many whys? and
whats? This was the perfect opportunity to share with the classroom that
my time there was coming to an end and that soon, I will meet a new class of
friends. Some children were sad, two boys were mad, and a few did not seem
to be affected by the news, but I knew that I would miss them terribly and
already did. However, the Classroom Swarm Tree activity allowed the
childrens social-emotional, language and literature, math, fine-motor,
cognitive, science, and other skills to be developed.