Since their formulation two years ago, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have been adopted by 45 states, become a requirement of the Race to the Top competition, and have begun to influence the development of new curricula and assessments. But early childhood education seems nearly an afterthought in the Standards. Not only do they end (or begin) at Kindergarten, ignoring more than half of the early childhood age range, there are numerous omissions and commissions in the CCSS that don't fit with what we know about young children's learning and development. This presentation will focus on how the Standards can conform to early childhood rather than on how early childhood can fit the CCSS. We will begin with an overview of the policy context that led to the creation of the CCSS. We will describe why standards are so important to teaching at all levels, and why we have to be cautious about not turning standards, which are meant to be benchmarks, into thresholds, thereby transforming a marker of achievement into a potential barrier to learning. We will describe the natural variability in childhood learning and explain how standards can be shaped to reflect this variability. And we will discuss how the existing CCSS can be reformulated to be more appropriate for development. Finally, through focus on implementation in a single state, we will illustrate how standards for children younger than age five can be formulated to reflect children's natural developmental trajectories.