If you’ve toured more than one preschool in Gilbert, you’ve probably heard the same phrase at every single one: “We believe in learning through play.” It sounds warm. It sounds child-centered. And after the third or fourth school says it in the same tone of voice, it starts to sound like it doesn’t mean anything at all.

That frustration is completely valid, because here is the truth: “learning through play” is a philosophy, not a curriculum. It tells you how a school believes children learn. It says nothing about what they’re actually teaching, how they know it’s working, or whether your child will be ready for kindergarten at the end of it.

I’m Shannon Powell. I’ve been an early childhood educator for over 15 years, I’m a certified Arizona teacher, and I built TotSpot’s curriculum from the ground up because I wasn’t satisfied with what I found in other programs. In this post I’ll walk you through what a real preschool curriculum should include, what questions to ask on your next tour, and exactly what we use at TotSpot and why.

What “Learning Through Play” Means and What It Doesn’t

Let me be clear about something before I go any further: I believe in play-based learning. Deeply. The research on how young children learn is consistent, and it points to the same conclusion over and over. Children between the ages of two and five learn best when they are moving, touching, building, pretending, and exploring alongside other children. Sitting still at a desk and completing worksheets is not developmentally appropriate for a three-year-old, and any school that tells you otherwise is not well-grounded in early childhood development.

But here is the distinction that matters: play is a methodology. It describes how learning happens. A curriculum describes what is being learned, in what sequence, toward what outcome, and how you know it is working.

A school can have children playing freely all day and produce very little that is developmentally meaningful. Or it can use play as the vehicle for intentional, structured learning where every activity is chosen with a specific developmental goal in mind. The difference between those two schools is enormous, and it is almost impossible to see from a 45-minute tour. You have to know what to ask.

What a Complete Preschool Curriculum Should Cover

When I evaluate a preschool curriculum, I’m looking for four areas working together. A school that covers only one or two of them is leaving a significant part of the job undone.

Literacy and language development

This is the area parents focus on most, and for good reason. Early literacy skills, including letter recognition, phonemic awareness, and the understanding that letters represent sounds, are among the strongest predictors of long-term academic success. A good curriculum builds these skills in a structured, sequential way rather than hoping that exposure to books and alphabet charts will do the work on its own.

Mathematical thinking

Not rote counting, but genuine mathematical understanding. Can your child count ten objects by touching each one? Do they understand that the number five represents a quantity, not just a word in a sequence? Can they recognize patterns, sort by attributes, and begin to reason about shapes and measurement? These are the foundations that kindergarten builds on, and they take intentional instruction to develop.

Social and emotional development

This is the area most often treated as secondary, and it is the one I’d argue matters most for kindergarten readiness. A child who cannot manage frustration, share materials, follow a teacher’s directions, or recover from a hard moment is going to spend most of kindergarten in survival mode. Academic learning is very difficult in survival mode. A curriculum that takes social-emotional development seriously, with specific programs and trained teachers, is not a soft alternative to academics. It is a prerequisite for them.

Character and values

Who your child becomes matters as much as what they know. Kindness, integrity, perseverance, empathy: these are not things children absorb automatically from being in a room with other children. They are taught, modeled, and practiced over time. A curriculum that includes explicit character education is investing in the whole child, not just the student.

What TotSpot Uses and Why

I want to be specific here, because specificity is what separates a real curriculum from a marketing line. At TotSpot we use four research-based programs, and I chose each one deliberately after seeing what it produces in children.

FUNdations for early literacy

FUNdations is a structured phonics program developed by Wilson Language Training, one of the most well-respected names in literacy education. It covers letter recognition, letter-sound correspondence, rhyming, syllable awareness, and early reading comprehension in a sequential, systematic way that builds on itself from one skill to the next.

I chose FUNdations because I watched too many children arrive in kindergarten with a scattered, inconsistent understanding of letters and sounds, able to recite the alphabet but unable to use it. FUNdations gives children a concrete foundation for reading rather than hoping that enough exposure will eventually click. By the time our students leave TotSpot, they are not guessing at sounds. They know them.

Everyday Math for mathematical thinking

Everyday Math was developed at the University of Chicago and is used in school districts across the country. At the preschool level, it focuses on number recognition, counting with understanding, ten-frames, shapes, patterns, measurement, and early problem-solving. Every concept is introduced through hands-on activities and real-world contexts rather than drill and repetition.

What I appreciate most about Everyday Math is that it teaches children to think mathematically, not just to perform procedures. A child who understands why five and three make eight is in a fundamentally different position than a child who has memorized that fact. Understanding is what transfers to new problems.

Conscious Discipline for social-emotional development

Conscious Discipline was developed by Dr. Becky Bailey and is one of the most comprehensive social-emotional learning programs available for early childhood. It is grounded in brain science and built around a simple but important premise: children’s behavior is communication, not defiance. When a child acts out, they are telling you something about what they need. The job of a trained teacher is to hear that communication and help the child develop the skills to express it differently.

This is the program I am most proud of at TotSpot, and it is also the hardest to implement well. Conscious Discipline requires genuine teacher training and a real shift in how adults think about children’s behavior. It is not a behavior management system where children earn rewards and lose privileges. It is a relationship-based approach where children learn to regulate their own emotions because they have been taught how, not because they fear consequences.

The children who go through this program leave with something most kindergarten teachers tell me they rarely see: the ability to name what they are feeling, ask for what they need, and come back to calm after a hard moment. That is a skill set that will serve them for the rest of their lives.

The Positivity Project for character education

The Positivity Project was developed with roots in positive psychology research and focuses on 24 character strengths including kindness, perseverance, creativity, integrity, and gratitude. Each week, our classrooms focus on one character strength through discussion, stories, and activities that help children understand what it looks like in real life.

I added this program because I kept seeing graduates who were academically prepared and emotionally regulated, and I wanted to do more with the values piece. A child who is kind, honest, and willing to keep trying when something is hard is going to do well in school and in life. That’s the whole point.

Why Curriculum Only Works With the Right Teachers

I want to say something that most schools won’t tell you: a curriculum is only as good as the teacher delivering it. You can purchase the best programs available and hand them to an undertrained or inexperienced teacher and get very little out of them.

Conscious Discipline alone takes years of practice before a teacher can use it fluently in a room of seven three-year-olds on a hard Tuesday morning. FUNdations requires understanding the structure of language well enough to explain it to a child who has never thought about sounds before. These are skills that develop with training and time, and they cannot be rushed.

Several of our lead teachers at TotSpot have been with us for five to ten years or more. That means they know these programs deeply, not superficially. They have taught FUNdations hundreds of times. They have used Conscious Discipline through thousands of hard classroom moments. That experience is not something you can replicate with a new hire and a training binder, and it is one of the clearest reasons why teacher retention matters as much as curriculum selection.

Questions to Ask Any Preschool About Their Curriculum

The next time you tour a school, here are the questions that will tell you whether there is a real curriculum behind the philosophy:

• Can you name the specific programs you use for literacy, math, and social-emotional development?
• How long have your teachers been trained in those programs?
• What does a child know and what can a child do when they leave your school?
• How do you assess whether children are making progress?
• How does your curriculum change as children move from your 2-year-old program to Pre-K?

A school with a real curriculum can answer every one of those questions without hesitation. If the answer is vague, circular, or defaults back to “we believe in learning through play,” you have your answer.

If you’re still weighing your options, here’s a complete guide to choosing a preschool in Gilbert AZ.

Curriculum Is a Promise

When you enroll your child in a preschool, you are trusting that school to spend your child’s most developmentally significant years on something intentional. The years between two and five will not come back. What happens in them matters.

A real curriculum is not a marketing line. It is a commitment to your child’s development, backed by research, delivered by trained teachers, and designed to produce something specific. Ask the question. Expect a real answer. And if you’d like to see what that looks like in practice, come visit us on a regular school day.

And if you’d like to see what that looks like in practice, come visit us on a regular school day.