It’s a picture-perfect fall morning in this Northern California town, and the youngest students at Laurel School Lower Campus are taking full advantage of it during their lengthy recess.
The swing sets are in heavy rotation. One 4-year-old, legs pumping vigorously, soars high above her peers. On the monkey bars, a girl hangs for what seems like an eternity, her legs dangling. Seven or eight students, mostly boys, zip around a paved surface on three-wheeled bicycles. And in a muddy sand pit, children take turns pumping water from a freestanding, commercial-size water dispenser. Two girls announce that they’re making dinner with their wet globs of sand, much of which oozes down the front of their clothes. They don’t seem to notice as they make their way to the nearby play kitchen.
This fall marks the fourth year of Laurel’s transitional kindergarten, or TK, program. In-house expertise in early childhood education and a physical layout conducive to very young children made this elementary school an optimal site for the Menlo Park City school district to pilot TK—which is free for all California residents who turn 4 by Sept. 1.
Policymakers in California and other states that have added universal pre-K for 4-year-olds see this transitional grade between preschool and kindergarten as an antidote to declining student enrollment in public schools—blamed largely on falling birth rates, increases in school choice, and strict immigration policies. It’s an alternate solution to laying off teachers or closing facilities, says Hanna Melnick, senior policy adviser and director of early learning policy at the Learning Policy Institute.
In California, about 52% of eligible children are now enrolled in TK, and the state expects enrollment to continue growing.
But 4-year-olds aren’t just younger versions of school-age children. They’re physically, emotionally, and cognitively unique from older students. What they need from schools differs, too—the physical space they occupy, their curricula, and the training their teachers receive all must be designed with their developmental needs in mind.
As more families enroll their children in pre-K and TK classes, it can be a scramble for elementary schools to prepare to accommodate such young learners.
“We really thought about developmentally appropriate practice. We were very intentional to make sure that TK was more like our early learning center and less like kindergarten,” said Kristen Gracia, the superintendent at Menlo Park City. “We thought about how we could support children to learn how to be in a community together, and how to create really rich opportunities where children could be self-directed and have opportunities to learn through play.”
In Menlo Park’s TK program, 4-year-olds are able to just be 4
“Exuberant, Imaginative, and Testing Limits.”
This is how Menlo Park City’s online parent resource guidedescribes 4-year-olds.
But for educators, honoring the opportunities and challenges of the age can be a tricky balancing act. In many ways, early education demands more of children academically than ever before, and at ever-earlier ages. Yet children are increasingly starting school struggling with age-appropriate social-emotional skills and independence.
“I started my career as a 1st grade teacher, and probably what I was teaching then is what kindergarten does now. We know this as educators. And we’re trying to slow the train on that,” Gracia said.
The focus on “kindergarten readiness” tends to bleed into pre-K and TK programs, experts say.
“When I’m working with educators, I hear, ‘Oh, we have to make sure that they’re ready for kindergarten. We have to make sure they’re ready for 1st grade,” said Kizzy Albritton, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin College of Education. “We then start expecting children to act like that [next older] age group.”
It’s a mindset Gracia works hard to combat.
“We do want to think about readiness for kindergarten,” she said. “But the goal is not that when students leave TK they’re meeting all the kindergarten standards. The goal is that they leave TK ready to be in a kindergarten environment.”
A transitional grade rooted in expertise on child development
The district’s internal expertise in early childhood education has made it easier to stay grounded in that goal, Gracia noted. The Early Learning Center, for children ages 2 to 5, shares a campus with the Laurel School Lower Campus, attended by students in TK through 2nd grade. The school’s campus for 3rd through 5th graders is about a mile away.
Chana Stewart, director of the Early Learning Center, led the launch of the district’s TK program in its first year. She continues to facilitate coaching and professional development for TK teachers, which is done in collaboration with early learning teachers.
“In recent years, we’ve seen more children who need support with self-regulation, like navigating big emotions and managing transitions, and who are still developing the social and communication skills to join play and work through conflicts with friends,” Stewart said.
Early educators nationwide report similar concerns. The EdWeek Research Center in January 2026 surveyed 1,163 early educators and administrators who work with children in pre-K through 3rd grade. The survey asked about students’ behavior, emotional regulation, motor development, and other foundational skills. Across multiple areas—from everyday classroom routines to emotional regulation—educators reported that young children are struggling more than in recent years.
In response to this reality, Menlo Park City’s TK program gives children ample opportunities to grow in independence and agency.
Students have daily 40-minute outdoor play periods with multiple age-appropriate options—from climbing apparatuses and enormous sand pits to pint-sized picnic tables with crayons and paper—plus indoor choice time built around traditional centers that are focused heavily on imaginative play, with some early literacy options containing oversized, magnetic letters.
This strategy appears to be working. By early November, all of the students in a TK class at Laurel School handily chose activities and play partners during their free time, and most of them focused on one task for a sustained period of time—whether they were pretending to “make dinner” at a play kitchen area or piecing together parts of a train track on the classroom rug.
The 4-year-olds at Laurel School also independently do more mundane activities, like washing hands after bathroom breaks with few or no reminders, and hanging up coats and lunch boxes on their respective hooks, just outside the classroom door.
It’s these basic types of tasks that a majority of respondents to the EdWeek Research Center survey—75% of whom were preschool teachers—said their students are struggling with more than in past years.
Stewart, the Early Learning Center director, suggests that TK students can do more than they—or their parents—think they can. And the program builds in opportunities throughout the school day to practice their growing independence.
“We’re noticing that many children benefit from opportunities to build a sense of agency, whether that’s making choices, taking care of their belongings, managing self-care routines, or trying something tricky on their own,” Stewart said. “These are exactly the skills TK is designed to nurture.”
Play is at the heart of all learning for TK students
While much of the school day, which runs from 8:15 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. (with an option for fee-based after-school care), centers around open exploration in the classroom and on the playground, teachers do deliberately and routinely work with children in small groups on early literacy, math, and social-emotional skills.
Academic instruction feels like play to the students. For instance, during “counting collections,” an evidence-based early math practice, each student chooses a box that contains items like buttons or shells. As they organize the items using a simple grid system, they also count them. It’s a playful practice that gets at several early math concepts: counting sequence, one-to-one correspondence, and cardinality (the understanding that the last number counted tells how many are in the entire set).
Similarly playful are the fine motor journals that each student owns. They start as simple spiral-bound notebooks with the student’s first name on the cover. Then students personalize the journals using markers, stickers, felt, and other tactile materials. They practice tracing their names in vibrant colors—sometimes several layers’ worth. It’s a far more fun way for students to learn how to write their name than by simply tracing the letters on a lined black-and-white worksheet.
The teachers guide TK students in these early academic activities with fidelity. But ensuring that the kids master them isn’t their top priority.
“They’re going to learn to read. They’re going to learn to write,” said Lori Sitrin, a TK teacher at Laurel School. “But can we get them to be good humans? To sit and be patient? Take turns? Learn how to share? These are the most important things that I can pass on to them.”
The best place to learn and sharpen these skills, which can’t necessarily be measured on standardized assessments, is during outdoor play and free choice time which, collectively, make up about 50% of the TK school day at Laurel School, Sitrin said.
Easy access makes for smooth transitions
Each TK classroom leads directly to the playground, where students play rain or shine. Smaller picnic tables were installed outdoors for TK students to eat. But most of the other equipment, shared with kindergartners, was already size-appropriate.
Students at Laurel School also have immediate access to an outdoor bathroom on the playground and, when they’re in their classroom, a bathroom directly adjacent to it. An in-classroom sink just outside the indoor bathroom, reachable with the help of a stepping stool, allows students to independently wash their hands under the watchful eye of a teacher or aide. (Every class has a full-time aide, making the teacher-to-student ratio no more than 1 to 10.)
This eliminates the need for students to get in line for a bathroom break down a hallway and wait for each of their peers before they return to class, a practice that most early childhood experts agree is not age-appropriate for 4-year-olds.
“Transitions have always been challenging, and the reason is that they are asking 4- and 5-year-olds to do things for which they are not yet developmentally ready,” Rae Pica, an early childhood consultant, said. “We ask them to stand still and be quiet in a line, and they are not physically, socially, emotionally ready to do those things.”
Dale C. Farran, an emerita professor at Vanderbilt University who has conducted early learning research for 50 years, recalls visiting 139 preschool classrooms for a research project over a decade ago. She and her colleagues recorded that preschoolers spent an average of 25% of the school day—or about two hours—in transitions that involved lining up for various activities like lunch or bathroom breaks.
“The amount of transition time was unbelievable, and the amount of [teachers’] negative behavior management was high,” Farran told EdWeek.
On this early November morning at Laurel School, the transition between the end of the outdoor play period for TK students and returning to the classroom went smoothly, especially given that it required nearly 50 4-year-olds to stop whatever fun activity they were doing—from bubble blowing to swinging to “making dinner” out of muddy sand—to get in a line and return to their classroom.
Maybe it was because the students are accustomed to the daily routine, and they know what to expect. Maybe because they had sufficient time to burn off their energy. Maybe because the teachers didn’t request or expect 100% silence or motionlessness when the students were in line. Maybe it was because the children knew they were about to start another favorite part of the day: choice time.
Whatever the reason, when the teachers announced it was time to go inside, most of the students readily moved toward the building and lined up after returning play items to their respective places. Balls, chalk, bicycles, and other toys all have a place and, with a few reminders, the students found them.
In line to go inside, some students chatted with classmates in front or behind them. Others broke into spontaneous embraces or giggles. A few waited quietly, appearing to be worn out from all the activity. Some held hands.
When everyone was accounted for, the children moved back into their classrooms. Then it was on to choice time, the last period of the school day, with centers that include blocks, trains, a play kitchen, paint, and big magnetic letters.
“They love being at school, which is all we could hope for,” said Stewart. “Even when they come back from a long weekend or a holiday break, they’re excited to be here. It makes us realize, ‘Hey, we’re doing the right thing.’”
