Responsive Relationships and Interactions: Frog Street Toddler offers suggestions for how to build secure, trusting adult-child relationships that are foundational to children's development in the Social and Emotional domain and all other domains. For example, Welcome to Frog Street Toddler recommends assigning primary caregivers. The Activity Guides invite caregivers to spend time engaging with children and showing physical affection. The curriculum mentions the importance of being responsive to children's cues and needs, but it lacks comprehensive guidance on how to engage in sensitive, responsive caregiving with toddlers. The curriculum offers many opportunities for teachers to initiate joint attention with toddlers. However, it gives minimal guidance to teachers on how to start a back-and-forth exchange based on the child's focus or interest.
Daily Routines as Opportunities for Learning: The curriculum minimally addresses daily caregiving routines, which are rich opportunities to support toddlers' development and learning in all domains. Welcome to Frog Street Toddler provides limited guidance on how to establish developmentally appropriate schedules and routines for toddlers, such as "follow the same daily schedule" or "tell little ones what is coming next." Additionally, there are only a few examples in the entire curriculum on how to extend children's learning during caregiving routines (e.g., describe actions when changing a diaper or having lunch with little ones; compare real bananas to a photo).
Play and Exploration: The curriculum provides minimal guidance on research-based practices to support toddlers' play and exploration. Welcome to Frog Street Toddler and "Spruce Up Your Space" tips describe how to create an indoor and outdoor environment for active physical play and exploration (e.g., provide plenty of space for physical movement; set up areas of the room with a variety of activities, textures, and materials). The curriculum mentions the importance of free play for children's development and provides some opportunities for open-ended exploration (e.g., painting; building with boxes; exploring shoes). However, many of the suggested activities are teacher-directed and narrowly focus on completing a task in a particular way. Frog Street Toddler does not describe how or when to allow time for child-initiated play throughout the day or how to provide learning experiences based on children's interests, which research shows contribute to toddlers' development in both Approaches to Learning and Cognition.
Language-Rich Environment and Interactions: The curriculum promotes research-based teaching practices to support toddlers' development in the Language and Communication domain, such as using varied types of talk with toddlers (e.g., modeling complete sentences, introducing new words, engaging toddlers in extended discourse). Frog Street Toddler also provides several learning experiences that encourage caregivers to sing songs, recite rhymes, do finger plays, and read books with toddlers. Research demonstrates that these activities support toddlers' emergent literacy skills. The curriculum introduces children to new and interesting vocabulary words each week, but this vocabulary is not based on children's interests or engagement.
Promoting Emotional, Behavioral, and Cognitive Self-Regulation: Frog Street Toddler consistently promotes research-based practices to support toddlers' emotional, behavioral, and cognitive self-regulation. The curriculum gives guidance on how teachers can use emotional coaching to help toddlers understand and manage their emotions. Similarly, Welcome to Frog Street Toddler provides strategies to facilitate the development of emotional and behavioral self-regulation skills, such as discussing basic rules and offering choices to children. Finally, the curriculum offers many activities to support toddlers in developing executive functioning skills (e.g., Simon Says; Stop and Go; acting out rhymes and songs).
Facilitating Cognitive Development: The curriculum promotes some research-based teaching practices to support toddlers' development in the Cognition domain. For example, the curriculum encourages adults to scaffold toddlers' problem-solving skills by modeling strategies, introducing a process (e.g., identifying a problem, generating possible solutions, trying out solutions), and allowing children to solve their own problems (e.g., understanding why a block tower tumbled down, retrieving a ball out of reach). Many of Frog Street Toddler's activities provide prompts for teachers to extend toddlers' learning, such as providing language-rich input about objects or experiences and asking open-ended questions. However, there is less information on how teachers can intentionally support toddlers' cognitive development during play and open-ended exploration. Similarly, the curriculum features several activities that focus on introducing toddlers to math language and concepts, but the curriculum does not specify how to embed math language and concepts into daily caregiving routines (e.g., mealtimes, diapering, toileting).
Supporting Physical Development: Frog Street Toddler consistently promotes research-based practices to support toddlers in the domain of Perceptual, Motor, and Physical Development. For example, the Activity Guides and Photo Activity Cards provide learning experiences to support toddlers' gross and fine motor skills (e.g., jumping, climbing, using paintbrushes, manipulating play dough). Similarly, the Activity Guides and Photo Activity Cards suggest intentional teaching practices to support perceptual understanding and perceptual-motor development (e.g., asking children to name body parts as they stretch, describing textures as toddlers walk on a tactile path). The curriculum includes many varied opportunities for toddlers to practice new physical skills, such as activities inviting toddlers to put on various clothing items or using physical skills during other self-care routines.