There continues to be a need for providing teachers of young gifted learners with best-practice approaches for the development of curriculum in gifted education programs. Too often, early childhood gifted programs have focused on academic acceleration, and neglect to consider developmentally appropriate approaches to designing curriculum and implementing instruction. This paper presents the Critical Curriculum Components Model as a guide for early childhood educators to consider. It also proposes that that this model can serve as an evaluative tool to analyse existing programs. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)