Their Rights, Inc.

💡 Quick Tip: Before your IEP meeting, write down your child’s strengths. Starting with what your child CAN do shifts the conversation toward empowerment. 🌟

According to the National Association for the Education of Young Children, “observation, documentation, and assessment of young children’s progress and achievements is ongoing, strategic, reflective, and purposeful.” Observing, documenting, and assessing children as they play allows educators to collect important information in a setting that is comfortable and familiar. Information can be collected through: 

📝Narratives (running records, anecdotal notes, transcription of interviews and conversations), 
✅Criterion-referenced methods (developmental checklists, rating scales, class list logs), 
🎨Work samples (photographs, audio/video recordings, writings, drawings, constructions, art media), and 
📈Quantitative methods (frequency counts, time samples).

Educators, what does developmentally appropriate assessment look like in your learning environment? How do you use observation to gauge where your learners are developmentally?

Parents, what information can you gain about your child(ren) by observing their play? What do you notice about their vocabulary? creativity? humor? experimentation? representation?