Preschool lesson plans when there's no curriculum to follow: a teacher's guide
Jenn Bell
A lot of preschool teachers plan every week with nothing handed to them. No binder. No scope-and-sequence. No teacher's guide announcing that week four is apples. Just a blank page on Sunday night, and a room full of three-year-olds arriving Monday morning either way.
Maybe your center follows an outdoor classroom model — all the children outside for most of the day, stations spread across the yard, and you want to make sure you've covered each developmental area. Or maybe you follow what the children are into right now, and you want to pull together a quick small grouptime built around the activity they couldn't leave alone yesterday. Or maybe teacher conferences are coming up and you want to plan something specific so you can document their fine motor skills.
If that's you, here's what I want to tell you: you're not behind, and you're not doing it wrong.
I had a blank weekly template and a theme-based approach I'd built myself. One of the children mentioned they'd seen dolphins jumping in the ocean, and the whole class lit up. That was my week: a water table with whale and dolphin figures, a sensory bin full of real seaweed (I live near the beach so I could actually get it), sorting shells, sprinkler play where we jumped like dolphins ourselves, The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister, sand art. I'd write down what I thought of first, then keep adding to the boxes as the week went on and new ideas came.
It worked. And many teachers I've known build it the same way — they start from their children's interests, and figure it out as the week unfolds.
You're not alone in this
In large federal studies of real preschool classrooms, teachers planning without any published curriculum were consistently one of the biggest groups observed — in some studies, the single largest group. Not the outlier.
What a curriculum gives you — and how to build it yourself
A curriculum is really doing three things for you. It gives you a shape for the week so you're not starting from scratch every Sunday. It connects the days so things feel purposeful rather than random. And it helps make sure you're reaching different areas of development over time — not just the activities that come easily.
You can build all three yourself. Here's how.
How to plan a week with no curriculum
Let one good idea carry the whole week. The dolphin week worked because one child's excitement handed me a theme — and from there, everything connected. The water table became ocean science. Sorting shells became early math. Books and songs tied the language piece in. Sprinkler play covered gross motor and social development. One idea, most of the developmental map covered. When you find your thread, let it carry as much as it can.
Make it intentional across the domains. You already know how to do this — the question is just making it visible. In California, the developmental domains are laid out in the PTKLF — the state's early learning foundations for children ages 3–5½. Take a look at your week and check that you're not planning in only one lane. If your program uses the DRDP for child assessment, it's aligned with those same foundations — so your planning and your documentation are already speaking the same language. If you're teaching in a multilingual classroom — the PTKLF also includes an English Language Development strand worth keeping in mind.
Don't plan yourself into a corner. Your plan is a starting point, not a script. Leave room for what the children bring — because some of the best moments in a preschool week are the ones you didn't plan. A child adds something unexpected, or one activity sparks a question that carries the next three days.
Write down what happened. A sentence or two after the fact — what a child did, what surprised you. That's also exactly where next week's plan comes from. And if a director or licensing visitor ever asks what your planning is based on, that documentation + alignment to the PTKLF is your answer.
Where a framework fits — if you want one
Not using a boxed curriculum doesn't mean working in a vacuum. If you lean toward following the child's lead and documenting what unfolds, that's the heart of Reggio-inspired teaching. If you like a "child plans it, does it, then looks back" rhythm, that's the bones of HighScope®. A calm, prepared room where children choose purposeful work — that's the Montessori instinct. And if your day is following the play and building from it, that's play-based — a real answer, not a placeholder for "no method."
In California, the PTKLF is the framework underneath all of them. Whether you're Reggio-inspired, play-based, or building from scratch, you're working within the same state foundations.
A few questions teachers ask
Do I need a published curriculum to teach preschool?
For most California teachers at private centers: no. Title 22 licensing covers health, safety, and ratios — curriculum is a local decision. If you're in a CSPP (state-funded program) or Head Start classroom, the answer is different — those programs have documentation requirements tied to the PTKLF, and your director will want to see alignment. Either way, understanding the PTKLF is worth it regardless of where you teach.
What do I say when a parent or director asks what curriculum we use?
"We plan from the children's interests and align each week with the developmental domains in California's early learning foundations." That's honest, it's specific, and it holds up.
One last thing
The planning wasn't the hard part. I knew my kids; I knew what materials made sense. The hard part was the closet — standing there on a Monday morning, pulling things off shelves: oh, this would work, oh, this too. All that deciding was happening live, in the margins of a morning that was already full.
What I wanted wasn't someone to plan for me. I wanted the details written out so I could hand them to my aide without a hallway explanation, so she could walk into the sensory bin activity already knowing what it was and why — especially on the mornings when a child needed me at the door and I couldn't be in two places at once.
That's what Planella does. The materials, the setup, the developmental reasoning — it's already there. You run it through your own judgment, then hand it off or follow it yourself. The thinking that usually lives only in your head now has somewhere to live.