"Standards," "guidelines," or "benchmarks" are different ways to describe curriculum-driven preschool requirements. Historically, children's education in the United States has been guided by content standards in grades K through 12. An educator may view the movement toward rigorous curricular frameworks and resulting assessments, and whether or not that teacher was trained to work that way with young children, it appears such standards are here to stay. In this case, teachers have to deal with teaching the required curriculum and still making the learning experience fun, motivating, and developmentally appropriate. In this article, the authors take a closer look from a developmental perspective at what an experienced teacher does quite naturally each day in the classroom and relates it to a curricular framework.