As a director of an early childhood program?

Justifying what you need and explaining it in detail is quite tedious. Rather than organizing your proposal by what you need to successfully complete each lesson plan, list what equipment and materials you need by what skill the children will develop. For example, you need pencils, crayons, chalk, paintbrushes, etc. for fine motor skills. You'd like, x, y, and z for gross motor.....Chances are when you prepare your lesson plans you use that type of outline anyway. Or say things like to develop scientific skills, we'll need... That way it's not sounding frivolous and it shows how it directly benefits the children to perform that activity.

EC is right I think, as a general rule. However, I worked for several years for an early childhood program that was part of a school district and because we reported to the school board, we did have to justify purchases sometimes, especially high cost items, and field trip requests always had to be justified. We would write up our request in such a way that it was clear why this planned trip had educational value to the children. We would also include a brief description of activities to be done before the trip to prepare the children and follow-up activities for after the trip to support our learning objectives. The same applied to big money purchases for the center or classrooms. We would describe educational value of the items requested and how we would prepare the children for using the items, and what we would do to support the educational goals. It's actually very easy to do since almost everything has some educational value for preschoolers. Social interaction, how to behave in public, plus the knowledge to be gained from the destination or materials are all acceptable goals. The only things I never tried to request were entertainment items like video games!