How to Create a Preschool Portfolio That Captures Real Learning (Week 4)

Today, we are going to talk about the importance of noticing progress. If you follow our free online preschool curriculum, then by now, you have accomplished so many different kinds of activities with your child:

• You worked on recognizing letter sounds and capital and lowercase letters.
• You have counted over and over again.
• You have engaged in some fun science activities, such as determining whether things sink or float.
• You've read, I'm sure, lots of stories.
• Gone on some walks and done so many activities that your child is soaking in all of the learning.

I hope that you've had a tremendous amount of fun so far. But more than that, I hope that you're starting to let it sink in for yourself, that you are really capable of preparing your child for kindergarten and beyond. And I hope that you found this process relatively easy. I know that there are challenges along the way, but you're starting to develop a sense of what works for you and your child.

The importance of noticing the progress

Noticing progress is so incredibly important for several reasons. When you look at it on a day-to-day basis, it's easy not to be able to really see how much you're really accomplishing. The days slip by, and you're doing activities, but it's very hard to grasp how much you're actually doing and how much your child is actually learning if you don't have a way of tracking it and of looking back to reflect on where you started and how far you've come.

So there are lots of different ways to do that. You need to find a way that works for you because not every way works for every person. I definitely know that. And so, in this article, I'll talk a little bit about some of the ways that I've tried, and hopefully you'll find one that really fits with your life and the way that you work.

Notice the unseen wins

One of the things I wanted to mention before we get into it is that you want to not just notice the academic progress or the fine motor skills progress your child is making. But you also want to notice what I call these unseen wins, which are more of the intangible qualities of the progress that you're making.

These might be changes in your own mindset:

• Developing a more confident attitude teaching your child.
• Developing your own philosophy of learning that works for you and your kid.
• Understanding how you want education to be approached with your child and in your home.

They can be things like:

“an increased quality or amount of time spent with your child that is more purposeful, that you and your child are getting more out of it, and that it's more of a bonding and learning experience”.

Those are unseen wins that are really hard to quantify. It's really those intangible things that are some of the most important things to be noticing because they will improve your confidence. They will encourage you to keep going when you do hit a challenging period down the road.

Developing a learning partnership with your child

Also, developing a learning partnership with your child, that relationship which is so fundamental. Not just to their success in this preschool program that you're doing, but beyond, so far, beyond whether you continue to educate them at home or whether they go into a traditional school setting.

That partnership you're forging now with your child is so incredibly important to the future and how you will work with them in the future on everything, whether it's helping them with their schoolwork or things around your home, and just your family dynamic. 

Forging that really close partnership of being a team and of working together and of being on one another's side to overcome challenges. That's what’s being forged right now.

And noticing that is an incredibly important aspect of noticing the overall progress that you're making.

So, how do you track your child's progress?

Preschool progress report

A very straightforward way to track your child’s progress across all developmental areas is to use a preschool progress report. You can find many templates online or use the Ready for Kindergarten and Beyond curriculum’s progress report template that covers all 6 key development areas in early childhood education: math, language, literacy, fine motor, cognitive, and social-emotional skills.

Image here of progress report.

But also, there, at this age, there are so many things to note down that don't fall into a nice neat checkbox. How do we then measure the progress that can not be marked “mastered” on your child’s preschool progress report.

The importance of a preschool portfolio

There are so many other things that are a little bit more ephemeral than counting, letter sounds, and fine motor skills. For example, my child made the funniest joke today, or the most insightful observation. And you want to capture that stuff down too.

Or they're doing a project, they're building a Lego structure. Or they're balancing on the balance beam at the park, and you want to capture all those things as well. Even though that's not progress in academics, they're not turning out volumes of worksheets that you can put in a binder to see how much your child is progressing.

So this is why I really encourage moms of preschoolers to find alternative ways to document what their child is doing, because it's not like an older school child, where at the end of a month or a semester, you have a giant stack of worksheets to look at.

You want to see, WOW, my child is really doing a lot, accomplishing a lot, learning, exploring, growing.

How to make a preschool portfolio

Take photos, videos, and voice recordings

We all walk around with our phones and that's a fantastic tool to use to document what your child is doing every day, take some snapshots of different things your child is involved in and playing with, record some short videos and then you can have a little file folder set up that you can just drop those into.

I encourage you to break it up into monthly chunks so that you can look back and reflect over a period of time. That's where you notice and you see the big gains. You might want to look back and reflect at the end of every week, but I especially encourage you at the end of every month to set aside a time to look back and see what we did this month.

Because it's so easy to forget, I'm constantly forgetting by the end of the month what we were doing at the beginning of the month. And when I take the time to look back and reflect on my records, my photos, and my videos of that, it astonishes me every single time.

And it's really encouraging. And it does provide a portfolio for your child as well.

Collect art and worksheets into a binder

Obviously, you will have some paper that you should have a folder for where you can look back and collect their art and the worksheets that they do; there will be some of those at this age, so you want to track that as well.

Capture the temporary art and projects

Photos are another great way to capture projects that your child works on, that maybe you don't want to save. For example, the Lego creations are going to get torn down and rebuilt, so that's a great way to document these bigger projects that maybe you don't want to actually hang on to, but you want to somehow save that record that they've done them. So photos are another great way to do that as well.

Find your best medium to take notes and journal

I have a paper journal, or it's a paper scheduling book, and I use it as my journal. It's not just to keep track of what I'm supposed to do each day and my appointments, but I also make notes in there of the fun stuff that we did that day, where we went, and what we were working on.

You can make notes of what book you read that day. So if you're a paper person and you're not into keeping a specific journal (I'm not a journaler). I'm really bad at it. And so if by just using my diary to jot down notes of what we did that day, that's a really easy way for me to keep track of that.

I am also trying to be more of a technology user and use my apps. You can use, there are so many note-taking and journal-keeping apps available to help you do this, but I just use the Google Notes app, and I put a little note in there for each day.

And the fun thing about this is that they're searchable. So if you want to remember a specific event, you can search your notes for when that happened, and I can also attach a photo from the day to that little Google note.

If you're not into typing, you can use the voice feature to talk into the phone and say what you did that day, or capture a little voice recording of your children talking about what you did that day.

The benefits of creating a portfolio are almost too many to really tell you.

You not only create this portfolio of work of what your child is really learning and really doing, but this is such an incredible way to remember this time that you're spending with your child together. It's a great memento to look back at. I can tell you from having older kids that they love looking back at my records of what they were learning and doing, and seeing the pictures of themselves and remembering, oh, I remember that day that we did that, or the time that I built that.

But more than anything, it serves as a confidence booster and as a reminder, when things do get challenging and difficult, that you are more than capable of teaching your child of how much you have already accomplished, of how you've overcome challenges previously. You'll be able to do the same again.

And it's really just self-inspiration to keep going and keep overcoming.

I hope that you found this helpful. I want you to just pause for a moment and celebrate all of the progress that you've made so far, and it's going to continue to grow and grow as your child learns more and more. And I'll see you next time.