Houghton Mifflin Splash Into Prek Pacing Guide

How the Houghton Mifflin Splash Into Prek Pacing Guide Actually Works in a Real Classroom

The pacing guide from HMH's Splash Into PreK program is essentially a weekly roadmap that breaks down the entire curriculum into teachable chunks across the school year. It covers language and literacy, mathematics, science, social studies, and the arts. Each week gets a with suggested daily lesson structures, materials lists, and assessment checkpoints. The guide is designed so a teacher with zero experience can pick it up and run with it, but it was never written for ideal conditions. That matters more than most people realize. You get it directly from the HMH website. Log in to yourteacher account or create one, navigate to the Splash Into PreK product page, and look for the Resources tab on the right side. Under Curriculum Tools you will find the Pacing Guide PDF. If you are working through a district contract, your curriculum coordinator may have already pulled it for you. Some schools still receive printed binders, which is fine, but the digital version updates more frequently when HMH pushes revision packs. The file is usually around 4-6 MB and takes up maybe ten seconds to download. Once you have it open, the layout is consistent. Each unit gets a two-page spread. The left column is the scope and sequence for that unit. The right column is the day-by-day lesson breakdown. At the bottom of every spread there is a box called Differentiation Pathways. That is where the pacing guide stops being generic and starts becoming something useful, or at least it should.

What the Guide Is Actually Built For

Splash Into PreK covers 18 units across the academic year. The pacing guide assumes roughly a 36-week schedule, which means some units run two weeks and others run four. The heavier units are Language and Literacy Block and Math Block, each getting about 8-10 weeks of instruction time. Science and Social Studies rotate on a three-week cadence. The Arts module is shorter, typically one to two weeks per unit. The daily lessons are structured around the 45-minute English Language Arts block and the 45-minute Math block. Within those blocks the guide recommends a warm-up, a modeled instruction segment, guided practice, independent or small-group work, and a closing reflection. That structure is not optional within the HMH framework. If you skip the modeled instruction segment, the alignment with their assessment items falls apart, because the assessments assume students were shown the exact procedure first. The guide also includes weekly family communication templates. Those are one-paragraph notes you can email or mail home that describe what students learned that week. They are not mandatory but they exist. I have found that using them cuts down on parent emails by roughly half.

What the Guide Does Not Tell You

Here is the thing nobody at HMH puts in the front matter. The pacing guide assumes a classroom with a stable enrollment. If you have a high turnover rate, which is common in many Pre-K settings, the guide does not account for children who missed two or three weeks of foundational skill-building. Those children fall behind immediately because the pace moves forward whether they are ready or not. I ran into this exact problem last fall. I had three students who started mid-unit in Week 6, and none of them had completed the early phonological awareness lessons from Unit 1. The pacing guide had us moving into phonics production by that point. I was stuck. I could not slow the whole class down, and I could not ignore those three kids. What I ended up doing was pulling a modified version of the unit from the HMH digital library and running a parallel small-group session for 15 minutes before the main lesson. The pacing guide does not mention this scenario anywhere. It just assumes everyone is starting together. I spent about an hour each day reorganizing my materials, but it kept those students from completely missing the phonemic awareness foundation. Another issue the guide glosses over is the transition from the warm-up activity to modeled instruction. The warm-ups are 5-7 minutes each. In practice, with a room of 20 four-year-olds, those transitions eat up 10 to 12 minutes of your block. If you are running exactly on the pacing guide's timeline, you will fall behind by Week 3 unless you trim the warm-up period or accept that some days you will not finish the planned lesson. I shortened my warm-ups to three minutes and added a visual timer that the children watch. It sounds trivial but it recovered about 15 minutes per day across the week.

Using the Assessment Checkpoints Correctly

Each unit has assessment checkpoints built into the pacing guide. These are not full tests. They are quick checks, usually 5 to 10 items, that tell you whether the class has hit the benchmark for that unit. The guide recommends administering them at the end of the unit. That is not always the right call. I have found it works better to run the checkpoint early, around day three or four of the unit, rather than waiting until the end. If you do it early, you catch students who are already off-track and can adjust the pacing for the remainder of the unit. If you wait until the end, you have spent two weeks teaching material that half the class did not absorb. The trade-off is that early assessment means you do not get a clean measurement of whether the full instruction landed. But in practice, catching the problem sooner gives you more time to remediate, which is more useful than a final number you cannot act on. The math checkpoints are particularly tricky. They assume students have been working with the HMH manipulative kits. If your school has not purchased the physical kits, or if the kits are shared between multiple classrooms, the checkup timing slips. I had a situation where the math manipulatives were unavailable for a full week. I substituted with drawn shapes and counting objects from around the room, and the students still hit the benchmarks. The pacing guide does not cover substitution strategies, but the core skill being measured is conceptual understanding, not manipulation of a specific tool. That distinction matters for anyone working with limited resources.

Common Mistakes People Make With This Guide

The biggest mistake is treating it like a script. The pacing guide is not meant to be followed word for word. The lessons within it are suggestions, and the language is deliberately flexible. If you read every line and attempt to execute every suggested activity, you will burn out by November. Pick the core lesson for each day, use the differentiation pathways for students who need support, and drop the optional activities unless you have extra time. That approach saves roughly 30 percent of your prep time per week. A second mistake is ignoring the science and social studies blocks entirely in favor of more literacy and math time. The guide allocates about six to eight weeks total across both subjects. Some teachers extend those because literacy and math feel higher stakes. But the non-literacy blocks reinforce vocabulary and conceptual thinking that feeds directly back into the language arts work. Skipping them creates a gap in background knowledge that shows up later in reading comprehension, even at the Pre-K level. A third mistake is not adjusting the pacing guide for individual IEP or 504 accommodations. The guide includes some differentiation notes but they are broad. If you have a child with an IEP that requires modified assessment conditions or additional processing time, you need to adapt the pacing guide to fit that. HMH provides separate Special Education resources, but they are not linked directly to the pacing guide. You have to cross-reference them yourself.

What Works Best in Practice

The most effective use of the pacing guide is to treat it as a planning scaffold rather than a strict schedule. At the start of each unit, I print the two-page spread, highlight the essential objectives, mark the assessment checkpoint date, and note which days I will need to pull small groups. Then I leave the rest blank for adjustments as the week progresses. This method has reduced my weekly planning time from about two hours to roughly 45 minutes, without sacrificing coverage. I also keep a running log of which lessons went smoothly and which ones did not. After three years of using Splash Into PreK, I have a personal annotation system on my copies. I write notes in the margins about which activities work with large groups and which ones require tighter management. When I revisit the guide in a later year, those notes are more valuable than anything in the PDF. The guide is not perfect. It is written for a classroom that runs with full staffing, consistent materials, and students who arrive with similar prior exposure. None of those conditions exist universally. But if you treat it as a framework rather than a rulebook, and you build in flexibility for the gaps it does not address, it does what it promises. It keeps you moving through the curriculum without losing your mind in the process.