The ZERO Curriculum · Preschool curriculum kit
What is in a preschool curriculum kit, and how to get one
A preschool curriculum kit is the working set a school needs to run the early years without writing everything from scratch: a day-wise plan for the whole academic year, the worksheets, flashcards and teaching aids that go with it, teacher training, and a way to watch and record how each child is doing. The ZERO Curriculum builds this for Indian preschools across Playgroup, Nursery, LKG and UKG, aligned to NEP 2020 and NCF-FS 2022, and delivered as both print-ready material and video training. You can start free, you can plan a preschool with our free programme, or you can take a full paid kit. All three paths are below.
Start free
Free curriculum and tools
Try the work before you spend anything. Open frameworks you can use at home or in class, plus a worksheet maker that builds printables on demand.
- Homeschool preschool curriculum, free for parents to run at home
- AI worksheet generator, free printable worksheets on any theme
- Request a free sample and audit call for your school
Preschool Entrepreneurship Program
Planning or running a preschool of your own? Our free Preschool Entrepreneurship Program walks through the business side, setup, registration, staffing, parents and the academics, so you build a school that holds up.
Join the free programme →The paid curriculum kits
Five ready-made kits, each a full day-wise plan with worksheets, teaching guides and video training. Pick by how you want to teach.
Customised curriculum development
Want a kit built around your own brand, language and state instead of an off-the-shelf one? Customised development starts at ₹743. Ask for a quote or message us on WhatsApp at +91 99106 80423.
Want a kit built for your state?
The mother tongue, the foundational-learning mission and the medium of teaching change from one state to the next. We hold a reference page for the preschool years in each one, and build kits to match. Start with your state.
Questions people ask about the preschool curriculum kit
What is a preschool curriculum kit?
It is the working set a preschool needs to run the early years: a day-wise plan for the academic year, the worksheets, flashcards and teaching aids that go with it, teacher training, and a simple way to observe and record each child. The ZERO Curriculum kit covers Playgroup, Nursery, LKG and UKG.
What is included in the kit?
A full day-wise curriculum across 220 days, daily teaching guides, print-ready worksheets, flashcards, cutouts and activities, monthly and weekly overview videos, training on dialogue and assessment, and classroom setup guidance. Teachers do not need any extra books to run it.
How much does a preschool curriculum kit cost?
There is a free path: the homeschool curriculum, the AI worksheet generator, and a free sample with an audit call. The paid kits are priced per kit, and customised curriculum development starts at ₹743. The premium customised Montessori option is quoted to a school’s brief. Ask for a quote against what you actually need.
Which age groups does it cover?
Playgroup at roughly 1.5 to 3 years, Nursery at 3 to 4, LKG at 4 to 5 and UKG at 5 to 6. Under NEP 2020 these sit inside the foundational stage, ages three to eight.
Is the kit aligned with NEP 2020 and NCF-FS 2022?
Yes. It is play-based, built around the developmental domains rather than rote subjects, uses observation in place of exams for the early years, and follows the home-language-first principle that NCF-FS 2022 sets out, while working toward the NIPUN Bharat reading and numeracy goals.
Is the kit print or digital?
Both. The worksheets, flashcards and teaching aids come print-ready, and the training is delivered as video with accompanying presentations, available around the clock so a teacher can prepare on their own schedule.
Can I try it free before paying?
Yes. Use the free homeschool curriculum and the AI worksheet generator, and ask for a free sample and an audit call so we can look at your setting before you spend anything.
Can the kit be customised for my state?
Yes, and it should be. The mother tongue, the medium of teaching and the state’s foundational-learning mission differ across India. We hold a reference page for each state and build kits grounded in that state’s real language picture. Customised development starts at ₹743.
Read this before you buy a kit
Most preschool kits are not a curriculum
Walk into the market for a preschool curriculum kit and here is what you are usually sold: a branded bag, a cap, a t-shirt, a stack of laminated charts, one thick book of a hundred worksheets, and a row of textbooks. A carton arrives. Someone calls it a curriculum. It is not. None of it teaches a child, and a fair bit of it gets in the way.
The bag, the cap, the t-shirt
Branded uniform does not make a preschool, and it does not bring admissions. A parent chooses a school on whether their child is safe, talking more, happy to walk in on a Monday, looked at as a person. A logo on a cap answers none of that. The merchandise is the most visible thing in the box and the cheapest to print, so it gets mistaken for quality. Branding is what you earn once the teaching is good. Put it first and you have a well-dressed child being drilled by rote, which is what a lot of these schools quietly are.
Readymade TLMs
A carton of generic teaching learning materials does not help. The number cards, the shape sorters, the bulk flashcards, identical for every school in the country, turn up with no plan behind them. A material only teaches inside a sequence: today, this child, this idea, this object, this question. Pull the sequence out and the teacher is left to guess, or the nice wooden set sits in a cupboard waiting for the inspection photo. Tools are not teaching. You bought objects.
The hundred-worksheet cluster book
One fat book of a hundred worksheets, the same copy for a child in Kohima and a child in Kota, sold as a year’s curriculum. It is not one. Worksheets are practice, the thinnest part of early learning, and a three year old does not learn by filling sheets. Trace the line, colour the apple, match the pairs. It keeps the room quiet and the parent reassured, and it teaches the child one thing fast: school is paperwork. NCF-FS 2022 asks for the opposite, play, talk, the home language, watching rather than testing. The worksheet book is the rote the framework warns against, bound and priced and resold every June.
The textbook kit
A set of preschool textbooks does not deliver a good education. It pushes content down a level it was never meant to reach. A two year old with a textbook is a small absurdity the market has made to feel normal. The early years are language, movement, play, the senses, learning to sit with other children and wait a turn. A textbook freezes all of that into pages to be finished by a date and shown to a parent. There is a reason the better preschools run bag-less and no-homework. A textbook kit is homework, just in a smaller bag.
So what is a real kit?
The part that teaches is the part nobody can shrink-wrap. A day-wise plan that knows what has to come before what. A teacher trained to run it, not handed a box and wished luck. The habit of watching each child closely instead of ranking them. Worksheets and materials live inside that, as help, never as the thing itself. Buy the plan and the training first. The bag can wait.
See what the ZERO kit actually includes →The research behind the objection
Why the evidence is against readymade kit materials
The case against a book of loose worksheets, a deck of flashcards and a tub of single-use plastic is not taste. It rests on decades of early childhood research and on the people who built the field. Here it is, by name.
Flashcards and worksheets are primary-school methods pushed down onto babies
The field has a word for what these materials do to a preschool: schoolification. Worksheets, flashcards and whole-group drill are the instruction of Class 2 and Class 3, dragged down onto a four year old who is not built for them yet. The OECD named the problem years ago in its early-years work, and developmentally appropriate practice, the yardstick the field measures against, treats heavy use of flashcards and maths worksheets in preschool as inappropriate, plainly. The damage is specific. A flashcard drills decoding, the sounding out of marks, and leaves comprehension behind. You get word calling: the child says “elephant” out loud with no elephant anywhere in their head. To a parent the decoding looks like reading, which is exactly why it sells, and it stalls the thinking that was supposed to grow. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff wrote a whole book on this and called it “Einstein Never Used Flashcards”. The title is the argument.
A worksheet is passive. Guided play is not.
This is not a case against teaching. Explicit, structured instruction has a real place, and it matters most for children from poorer homes who reach a classroom with less print and less talk behind them. But it has to sit next to play, not stand in for it, and a worksheet is not instruction anyway. It is a child filling a sheet alone while the teacher works the room. Take play out and you remove the one place a young child practises the cognitive and social skills the worksheet claims to build, the trying and failing, the taking turns, the holding of a plan in the head. Guided play keeps the learning goal and hands the child the initiative, the objects, the chance to make something. A worksheet hands them a box to colour inside. One of those grows a mind. It is not the laminated one.
Simon Nicholson and the loose parts a kit cannot hold
In 1971 the British scholar Simon Nicholson wrote “How Not to Cheat Children” and set out the theory of loose parts: open-ended materials, the kind that arrive with no instructions, are what grow invention and higher-order thinking in a child. A readymade kit is the opposite by design. It comes with rules, a correct way to use each piece, one outcome the maker had in mind. A plastic samosa from a play-kitchen set is a plastic samosa, and it stays a plastic samosa for the rest of its short life. A plain block of wood is a samosa, then a phone, then a boat, then the wall of a fort, then a baby to be put to sleep. The wood is doing the early storytelling, the engineering, the counting, the language. The kit’s plastic is doing none of it, because nothing has been left for the child to decide.
Symbols before experience, which is backwards
There is an old and sound account of how a young child reaches an idea, Pamela Liebeck’s ELPS: Experience first, then Language, then Pictures, then Symbols. Handle four apples, talk about four, see four drawn, and only then meet the numeral 4. The order is the whole point. A booklet of worksheets and a deck of alphabet flashcards drop the child straight onto the last step, the bare symbol, and skip the experience and the language that were meant to give the symbol something to stand for. The framework was a path. The kit treats it as a shortcut, and a shortcut past the first two steps leaves a child memorising shapes they cannot yet mean.
None of this says materials are bad. It says materials with no plan behind them, no sequence and no room left for the child, are not a curriculum, and the early years are where that does the most harm, because this is when a child works out whether learning is something you do or something done to you. Buy the thinking. The flashcards were never the hard part.
See how the ZERO curriculum sequences materials →