During the 1998-1999 academic year, the authors' state board of teaching changed the licensure configurations in early childhood from Birth to Age 5 to Birth through Age 8. This made early childhood teacher licensure commensurate with the National Association for the Education of Young Children's recommendation that an early childhood program is any group program in a center, school, or other facility that serves children from Birth through Age 8. Historically, their early childhood studies program at a small university in the Midwest has prepared students to work in child care centers, family-child-care homes, Head Start programs, private and public preschool, and parent education and community education programs. They needed to expand their program to prepare students to work in kindergartens and primary grade schools. The movement to a new program meant that education licensure students in their last year of teacher preparation had content and practice in the area of Birth to Age 5, but still needed the Age 5 to Age 8 content information. The authors developed and implemented a special course in the summer of 1999 that addressed mathematics and literacy Kindergarten through Grade 3. They then used the experience of implementing this course to guide their development of the Birth to Age 8 mathematics and literacy course for the new licensure program. This article reports their thoughts, struggles, expectations and surprises as they describe their backgrounds, planning for the course, implementation of the course, preliminary findings, implementation of subsequent courses, conclusions, and implications. The authors share these ideas from a new experience in hopes of fostering discussion and thought about content learning in early childhood courses.