Toddler teachers plan lessons by turning the curriculum their program uses into short, play-based activities that attach to the room's daily routine — circle, art, sensory, movement — and repeat through the week.
Observation drives the plan: what a child reached for this morning decides what goes on the table tomorrow.
Here is what changes after the infant room, the curricula centers use, what a toddler plan contains, and planning for two-year-olds.
How toddler planning differs
Infant rooms plan around individual care routines — if that is the room you are coming from, the infant lesson plans guide covers it.
Preschool rooms can build a week around one study, which is the approach behind how preschool teachers write lesson plans.
Toddler planning lives between those poles: activities short enough to survive a toddler's mood, repeated across the week, and anchored to the care routines that fill a toddler day.
The frame behind those differences is NAEYC's developmentally appropriate practice (DAP).
The position statement, issued in 2020, says each child from birth through age 8 has the right to equitable learning opportunities — in centers, family child care homes or schools — and its three core considerations are commonality in children's development and learning, individuality, and the context in which development and learning occur.
The companion DAP book is in its fourth edition.
Read against a toddler plan, the three considerations become three checks: what the age group is working on, what each child in your room can already do, and what your room's routines and materials allow.
One more difference: in a toddler room you plan the teacher's behavior as deliberately as the activity.
Harvard's Center on the Developing Child defines serve and return as responsive back-and-forth exchanges between a young child and a caring adult that shape brain architecture.
In practice that lands on the plan: note what you will do — get on the floor, narrate, wait, hand the turn back — and treat those moves as part of the lesson, not the background to it.
Toddler curriculum options
Your center decides what the room follows; your job is to deliver it and adapt it to the children in front of you.
Start with one distinction that job postings blur: a curriculum and a behavior framework are different tools.
The Pyramid Model (NCPMI) is a framework of evidence-based practices for promoting young children's social-emotional development — it works with a program's curriculum rather than replacing it.
Its tiers run from universal supports for all children to targeted social-emotional supports and individualized intensive interventions, built on a foundation of an effective workforce with supporting systems and policies.
When a posting lists Pyramid Model training, it is naming the behavior side, not the curriculum.
Conscious Discipline, created by Dr. Becky Bailey, describes itself as resting on four foundations: the Brain State Model, Seven Powers for Adults, School Family cultivation, and Seven Skills of Discipline — and describes itself as an evidence-based, trauma-informed approach.
Those are the program's own descriptions.
If a center names it in the posting or the handbook, ask which approach your room is trained in and take the training it offers.
Packaged curricula are the other option you will meet.
Teaching Strategies describes The Creative Curriculum for Preschool as built for 3- and 4-year-olds on play-based studies, with components including a Curriculum Guide, 9 Teaching Guides and 7 Foundation Volumes — a vendor description, and Teaching Strategies' product page does not state the edition.
That is the preschool edition's description; our research did not cover curriculum editions for toddlers or twos, so ask your director which curriculum and edition your room licenses and which studies it runs now.
For how the studies themselves run once children are preschool age, see this Creative Curriculum studies list.
Whichever curriculum a program runs, observation closes the loop.
Teaching Strategies GOLD is an online observational assessment for children from birth through third grade, rated against research-based objectives — 38 of them by Teaching Strategies' count — and its checkpoint reports show which children are below, at or above widely held expectations.
In California, the Desired Results Developmental Profile (DRDP) 2025 is now fully implemented for programs serving infants through grade 3, run by CDSS and CDE with WestEd.
Programs that screen may add ASQ-3, a parent-completed developmental screener for ages 1-66 months covering communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving and personal-social, and ASQ:SE-2, which screens social-emotional skills for ages 1-72 months with 9 questionnaires and is meant to be used alongside ASQ-3 or another general developmental screener.
Every one of those feeds your plans — the objectives, profiles and screening results tell you what to offer next.
If curriculum itself is the part of the job you like best, the interest has a job title: read what an education coordinator (curriculum coordinator) does — the role that works on curriculum program-wide.
Ask which curriculum in the interview
Toddler lesson plan example
Whatever format your program uses — a printed template, an app, a notebook — the parts of a toddler plan stay recognizable.
A workable example:
| Where it sits in the day | The routine block the activity attaches to — after drop-off, before snack — so the plan rides the day instead of fighting it. |
| The activity | One simple, open-ended offer — sensory, art, movement, books — that the same children can succeed at and repeat. |
| Materials | What goes on the table, gathered before the day starts. Toddlers do not wait on a supply run. |
| Teacher moves | The serve-and-return prompts: what you will narrate, model and hand back while the activity runs. |
| Adaptations | What changes for a child who is not there yet — the individuality check from DAP, written down before the morning it is needed. |
| Notes | Who tried it and what they did. In a program running an observational assessment like GOLD, those notes are the record it draws on. |
A week of toddler planning is repetition, not novelty: the same offer returns the next day with one thing changed — a new prop, a different color, a spot nearer the window.
When you choose the books and pictures that go with a plan, the anti-bias education framework names four core goals — identity, diversity, justice and activism — and the identity goal is the easiest to serve in a toddler room: board books and wall photos that look like the children in it.
Keep the plan honest by keeping it short.
A plan that names one good activity, the moves you will make and the child who needs a change is worth more than a full page of boxes, and the notes column is the part that makes tomorrow's plan better.
Planning for twos
Twos are the in-between year, and the field's own instruments split at their doorstep: ITERS-3, the 2017 edition of the Environment Rating Scale for center-based programs, covers birth through age 2, while ECERS-3 (2015) covers ages 3-5.
Which scale a given twos room is observed under depends on the program and the ages enrolled — ask your director rather than assuming from the room's name.
If you plan for mixed ages in a family child care home instead, the home-based scale FCCERS-3 (2019) covers birth through age 12, and one plan there has to stretch across a wide age spread.
The planning craft changes with the year: language arriving in a rush, parallel play turning into early turn-taking, whole-body movement that needs space, and toilet learning arriving somewhere in the middle of it.
The potty training in the toddler room guide covers that part of the job.
Expect a wide spread of skills inside one twos room — which is exactly what DAP's individuality check is for, and why the adaptations line in your plan matters more this year than the activity line.
The plans only work inside the day that carries them: a day in the life of a toddler teacher shows where planning, floor time and routines actually fall.
For the role as a whole — duties, qualifications, pay — start with the toddler teacher career guide, and when you are ready to run plans in a room of your own, browse current toddler teacher jobs.
Career information for early educators and the centers that hire them — not licensing or legal advice. Curriculum choices, assessment tools and observation scales belong to your program; confirm which ones your room uses with your director, and for the rules that bind your room, confirm with your state child care licensing agency.