Overview

As a teacher, you want to know if every child is developing and learning as expected in all four areas of development: social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language. The Creative Curriculum^® Developmental Continuum for Ages 3-5 is designed to help you find out by making purposeful observation part of your everyday practice. The Developmental Continuum is the core of the Assessment System and helps you to evaluate each child's developmental level, to map each child's progress, and to plan learning experiences based on individual strengths and needs.

Development typically unfolds in progressive steps. Children don't master a particular skill all at once. There is a sequence of steps to expect as children progress toward reaching developmental objectives. Having a way to determine each child's developmental level enables you to decide what kinds of experiences will support his or her progress. The Developmental Continuum describes the progression of typical development. It includes 50 objectives organized by goals in four areas of development: social/emotional, physical, cognitive, and language.

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How the Developmental Continuum Is Structured

The Developmental Continuum for Ages 3-5 uses the same 50 objectives as The Creative Curriculum for Preschool. Each objective is outlined as developmental steps labeled Step I, Step II, and Step III. These steps, along with their examples, describe the typical development of most 3- to 5-year-old children.

However, there may be children who, in one or more areas of development, are not yet in the typical range. A special category called forerunners describes the emerging skills and behaviors leading to Step 1 of typical development.

For those who need additional steps, we have divided the forerunner level into three steps called expanded forerunners. Forerunner 1, Forerunner 2, and Forerunner 3 describe the progression of skills and behaviors within the forerunner level. These expanded forerunner steps are particularly helpful in describing the development of a child with disabilities.

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The Assessment Cycle

We offer two choices of assessment materials. The Creative Curriculum Developmental Continuum Assessment Toolkit for Ages 3-5 is our "paper" version. CreativeCurriculum.net is a Web-based program that helps you streamline the assessment, reporting, and planning process. Both the paper and the online version view ongoing assessment as a cycle of four steps.

1)  Collecting Facts

The first step in assessing children to support learning is to collect facts. One effective way to do this is through ongoing observation and documentation. During this phase, you do these things:

• Write observation notes related to what children do and say during their everyday experiences.
  
  
• Collect samples of children's work, such as writing and art samples, photos, audio or video clips, etc.

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Next, you analyze the collected facts by asking yourself, How do these facts relate to the goals and objectives of the curriculum?

Then you evaluate the facts by asking yourself, How does this child's progress compare to most 3- to 5-year-old children? Using your observation notes and documentation, you think about all 50 objectives and consider which developmental step best describes the child's level of development in relation to each objective.

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The next question to consider is this, Now that I have this information, how can I use it to plan? This is the primary goal of ongoing assessment:  to build on children's strengths and to offer them challenging, yet achievable, experiences to guide their learning.

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Who else needs the information you have collected about children's progress, and exactly what information will be helpful to them?  In addition to families and teachers, administrators and funders ask for documentation of what outcomes the program achieves for children. By using our Web-based assessment tool, CreativeCurriculum.net, you can electronically summarize the progress of groups of children in multiple classrooms and at multiple sites. 

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Training

Teaching Strategies offers introductory training on The Developmental Continuum Assessment System, both at your location and at our national conferences. On-site training is customized to meet the needs of your staff. By participating in one of these sessions, you will have a better understanding of how to

• observe and document children's development and learning
  
  
• use the Developmental Continuum to track children's progress
  
  
• use assessment information to plan for individual children and for groups of children
  
  
• include families in the assessment and planning process
  
  
• create and read reports summarizing group progress

For CreativeCurriculum.net subscribers, we offer administrators, supervisors, and trainers both technical training seminars and interactive demonstrations delivered via the Internet.

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