Writing child observations, reflections and linking everything together doesn't need to be confusing or complicated. Try these simple tips for educators!
By Jan Millikan and Stefania Giamminuti This new title links the Early Years Learning Framework and documentation and draws on research from both Reggio Emilia and Australia.
A handy set of observation templates to use in the early years foundation stage, ideal to use in your early years setting to assess each child’s development.
Introducing our comprehensive EYLF Programming Folder/Planner, a valuable tool designed to support educators in effectively implementing the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF). This planner offers a convenient and organised solution for documenting and planning children's learning journeys as it can be printed multiple times, allowing it to be used over and over again. Our EYLF Programming Folder/Planner includes various essential components to streamline your programming process. Within its pages, you will find: Child Profiles: Dedicated sections for capturing personalised information about each child, including their interests, strengths, areas for further development, and family information. Assessment and Planning Tools: Thoughtfully designed observation forms tailored for individual, group, spontaneous, outdoor, and community-based learning experiences. These forms allow educators to document observations, track progress, assess against the EYLF and identify opportunities for intentional teaching. Intentional Teaching Forms: Specific sections to record intentional teaching strategies employed to scaffold children's learning and support the achievement of EYLF outcomes. Monthly Programming Templates: Convenient templates guide educators in planning and documenting monthly program outlines. These templates provide structure while allowing flexibility to incorporate children's interests and emerging ideas. EYLF Outcome Pages: Listing all 5 Learning Outcomes and Elements, these pages assist in aligning observations, assessments, and intentional teaching strategies with the EYLF outcomes. Our EYLF Programming Folder/Planner provides a comprehensive and efficient solution for educators in Australian childcare centres, allowing for seamless integration of the EYLF principles and practices into everyday programming. Stay organised, document children's progress, and unlock their full potential with our user-friendly and visually appealing planner. Watch this space for more exciting resources and updates to enhance your EYLF implementation! INFORMATION This listing is a PDF file containing over 140 pages. HOW IT WORKS This listing is for a digital file. After completing the payment, you will gain immediate access to the download link through Etsy. No physical materials will be shipped, saving you time and resources. You are welcome to print as many copies as necessary for your centre or home, ensuring easy access and distribution. REFUND POLICY All Canva template sales are final, and no refunds will be issued once the files have been emailed. For more information and resources, please visit us at: BLOG: www.myadventuresinchildcare.blogspot.com.au FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/MyAdventuresInChildCare Thank you for visiting! We genuinely appreciate your kind support and interest.
Audit Tool to help Nursery managers evaluate their Leadership and Management ready for an Ofsted inspection
The Empowered Educator - Analysis, Reflection and Evaluation in Early Childhood Programming.
"Recent studies document the importance of introducing children to the natural world, beginning in the early years"https://t.co/hZUYNqF3Va
Providing meaningful documentation has many benefits in the early childhood classroom. Today I want to share some examples of meaningful documentation.
What are floor books? | What is the purpose of them? | How to organise your floor book. Blog - Read More..
Learn how to use floor books in early years alongside the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum with these tips from early years teacher Katherine Bate.
My quest this year was to create a more organised environment in my classroom. A space that allowed for natural expression through various forms of play as well as a space that was organised and wa…
The Empowered Educator - Analysis, Reflection and Evaluation in Early Childhood Programming.
Find a selection of nature inspired products and downloadable documents For adventurous and curious nature loving children and their educators
This resource file contains over 126 valuable time saving templates, posters and printables to make documenting your childrens learning easy. The documents are organised under the following headings: Programming Portfolio Printables Sustainability Templates Intentional Teaching Pack - Cultural Diversity, Emergency procedures, Healthy Eating, Hygiene, Road Safety Theorist posters Transition Statement Templates Billy Bear - A Travelling Teddy My Snap Happy Weekend Learning Story Templates with links to outcomes and theorists From the Mouths of Babes - Documenting children s speech
Learning to write is much more complicated than we think. After all, most people can write so what is so difficult about it? It's second nature to most of us, yet take some time to look at yourself when you write. What muscles are you using? Switch hands and see if you can manage writing with your other hand. This may give you some idea of the level of control required to make meaningful marks on paper. Building muscle strength and learning to control those muscles is an integral part of children learning to write. Core muscles, the large arm muscles and the small muscles in the hand and wrist all need strengthening and developing in order for children to be able to gain control of a pencil or crayon. In addition to strengthening and controlling muscles, refining depth perception and visual tracking skills are important. Hand-eye coordination is essential as the hands and eyes have to work together to enable children to form letters and write across the page. While your child's first writing experiences may look like scribbles to you, if you ask them what they have drawn you may get a very complex story. Children recreate and make sense of their world first through their drawing and later through their writing. This takes time to develop and develops alongside their language. When a child can tell you all about their drawing and you can record that for them, they are learning that their words are valued and can be represented. When children begin to understand that symbols have meaning, they are on their way to being motivated to record these symbols for themselves. Their first efforts at writing recognisable letters will possibly begin with them writing their names between four and five years old. It's vital that children see their name written and have opportunities to write their names independently. This is their signature, it's not a copy or tracing of an adult's writing. Children who can write their names are very proud of this and this achievement needs to be celebrated, whatever the writing looks like, so they will be enthusiastic about writing. When their child is beginning to write, parents should not worry about letters that are not properly formed, letters that are back wards and that their child may have missed out letters. This is a natural part of children developing their writing style. They get plenty of practise at forming letters later on, the early years is a time for children to experiment as they develop the brain connectors needed to control their hand eye coordination and make writing on the lines possible. Source: Words their way Children need experiences to write about so exploration and interaction with the world around them and other people is essential. Children learn to express themselves through their writing when they have opportunities to: à draw, paint and create and a collage à practise their skills in a variety of contexts through different experiences à strengthen their muscles through manipulating materials during play à develop their coordination through physical activity à interact with their peers and adults Ideas to develop muscles and hand-eye coordination include: à playing outside, swinging, running, pouring sand and water, playing tag, swimming, riding a bike à exploring and experimenting with a variety of materials such as sand, water, glue, tweezers and tongs, boxes and puzzles à finger painting and gloop à working with playdough The more children are engaged in purposeful play; the more opportunities they have for interactions with others; the more they are positively encouraged; the stronger their foundations for both writing and reading will be and the more rewarding their progress will be for them as you celebrate each success together. Some examples of emergent writing
Planning is a task all teachers must do. You either love it or you hate it, and I LOVE it! I love it because my planning documents are purposeful. I refer to them and use them constantly throughout the term. No one wants to waste their time writing up planning documents only to file them away, nev
My quest this year was to create a more organised environment in my classroom. A space that allowed for natural expression through various forms of play as well as a space that was organised and wa…
Make parent education easy with this 9 page poster series on early learning schema play. These posters are legal sized (8.5 X 14) and can be reformatted in Canva for whatever size you need. You can use this editable template as a tool for documentation in your classroom. Edit the existing paragraphs to suit your needs and change the pictures to be your own. Many parents are not familiar with early learning play schemas and may find this documentation series eye catching and educational, especially once you customize the posters to have pictures of their own children included. Each of the 9 play schema posters includes relevant stock photos and a summary paragraph briefly explaining the schema - what it might look like and what materials can support furthering the play. ✨ This template can almost be used as-is with content specifically written for early learning educators. You will can update the details to reflect your renters opinions or experiences. Using a free Canva account you can edit text, colours, add your own images, placement, sizes and more. After purchase you will receive a PDF containing the link to the Canva template. A free Canva account is required to use this template. ✨ This template is for use on one Canva account. Do not share, sell or otherwise redistribute the template link.
Save time and ensure the work you do on child portfolios is an effective method of early years documentation. Ask these questions before 'doing' folios!
Preschool behavior management tips and tricks for preschool teachers, How to document challenging preschool behaviors with Free behavior observation log.
Documentation strategies for family child care & early years educators using the EYLF outcomes. Meet every step of the programming cycle easily.
I love starting the school year with this activity. It’s easy, parents love it, and it immediately gives the children a little boost of self-esteem by identifying a part of themselves that they like…
This is a planning brainstorm to use as a starting point for provocation ideas to enable the environment. Early Years Planning for Sleeping Beauty. The classic fairy tale about a
Find a selection of nature inspired products and downloadable documents For adventurous and curious nature loving children and their educators
We have had numerous emails and blog comments regarding our Portfolio/Documentation Books. (Thank you for your interest and patience for this post!) Here is a little bit more information about them to help inform parents and other blog visitors. Each child in our class has a Portfolio/Documentation Book with their name and photo on the top. These folders are filled with clear sleeves to easily update what is included inside. After a trip to London England with YRDSB's Leadership Study Tour in 2011, our school team received great inspiration from their approach to early years documentation. At the two schools that we visited, we were impressed by their documentation notes, organization, and how well they made the learning in their classrooms visible. This inspired us to start something similar that would fit into our Bond Lake P.S. context here in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Below are some images (cropped for privacy reasons) of how the documentation templates look like. On the top is space for the child's name and date, the context in which the learning took place, and the level of support that was given by adults. (Educators circle whether it occurred indoors, outdoors, if it was child/adult initiated, whether the child was alone, in a pair, small group, or large group.) In the middle is a space for a photo of the child engaged in play-based learning, inquiry-based learning, or other curricular learning experiences. On the bottom of the template is space for educator notes (observations or dialogue between the children), next steps, the links to the curriculum, and who made the observation. Last year we also started to use this template for math interviews. Below is an example of an interview about ordinal numbers. The only difference, is that the image section has clip art of students in a line that matched our question about ordinal numbers. Another component of our Portfolio/Documentation Books are our monthly writing samples. Each day our students are expected to share their thinking through graphic communication (drawing/creative expression paired with writing) and post it on "Our Daily Writing Hangs Here" wall. The next morning we sit in front of the writing wall to discuss and give feedback for our writing. The writing samples then get placed into a filing cabinet, and saved until the child is asked to choose their two best pieces for the month. After the two pieces are selected (using our learning goal and success criteria that is reviewed each day during our feedback time) there is a reflection template that is filled out by the educator and the child to describe their work and next steps for improvement. These two samples then get placed within the Portfolio/Documentation Books. The purpose of these Portfolio/Documentation Books is to make visible our daily learning and discoveries. Learning in kindergarten that is play-based and inquiry-based requires many photographs, as we do not run a worksheet based program. Our hope is that students re-visit their learning and share it with their parents during Family Fridays. For our classroom, these templates were an excellent way to start documenting our students and making observations of their learning. Our next steps will focus on more in depth pedagogical documentation of our inquiries and math problem solving experiences. These experiences are more difficult to squeeze into one photo and a single page template. For this reason, we will sometimes use the template above and sometimes create the story of learning using a word processing program. I hope that this gives you a starting point, and that it better explains our process for you. There will soon be an interview available about this via the ETFO kindergarten page as well. Feel free to make a comment on this blog post about your impressions of these books, as well as other questions that you may have. I would be happy to clarify them for you! Please note that these Portfolio/Documentation Books include moments of learning and observations. More pedagogical documentation in the form of inquiry binders and panels are also used around our classroom. Those are not per child, but rather for small groups of children or the whole class.
