May 6, 2025 — Teaching pre-K can be intimidating for new teachers: The developmental stages of three- and four-year olds and the need for both social emotional learning as well as early academics are a lot to juggle.
AppleTree Institute is a unique organization that is focused on both the research and the practice of teaching young children. Every Child Ready (ECR) is AppleTree Institute’s playful, comprehensive instructional model for pre-K classrooms. It integrates a high-quality curriculum with robust professional development and data-driven assessment tools, ensuring that educators are equipped to deliver impactful, differentiated instruction regardless of their experience in the field. The teacher residents within the AppleTree Early Learning Teaching Residency have benefited from each of these resources as they navigate learning foundational knowledge of how to teach young children while also in the classroom everyday.
Over the last five years, ECR has been used in communities across the country, including growing regions in the Northeast, the midwest and Texas, in addition to its largest cohort of classrooms in Washington, D.C. Customizable to meet the needs of both new and veteran educators, ECR provides scaffolding for teachers through scripting in lessons and opportunities for asynchronous learning through Canvas. With the growth of ECR, the program has also begun to see the impact of strong early learning sustain through the early elementary grade levels. As seen in the graphic, students who attended pre-K in ECR classrooms outperformed their peers in kindergarten on the iReady assessment in both math and literacy domains. Source: DREAM PCS, New York City
ECR continues to grow and is looking to add new partners to its cohort of schools. For more information about Every Child Ready, visit everychildready.org or reach out to Anne Malone at amalone@appletreeinstitute.org to connect.