Learning & Development: Childhood journeys

Children's records of achievement are sometimes referred to as a learning journey, or as a developmental 'profile' or 'portfolio'.

Maintaining a portfolio of a child's achievements across all aspects of development or areas of learning helps practitioners with:

- tracing children's direction of progress;

- sharing progress with parents or other professionals;

- planning to further children's progress; and

- presenting assessments in an attractive and meaningful way so that parents and children will enjoy contributing to it as well as looking back on it in years to come.

USING CHILDREN'S LEARNING JOURNEY PORTFOLIOS

- Tracing children's direction of progress

The learning journey portfolio provides a means of demonstrating that children are making good progress towards the early learning goals at the end of the Foundation Stage. It also provides a means of celebrating that child as an individual learner, who is progressing in a unique way, developing their own approaches to tasks and activities, building their own ideas and understandings, their own talents and abilities.

The purpose of tracing the direction of progress of individual children is to celebrate what they have achieved over time as well as to help the practitioner build on the child's interests and skills to promote further development.

Sometimes it becomes clear that a particular child is not making progress in all aspects or may not be on course towards the early learning goals. Children's records will begin to identify where children are stuck, or what may be blocking their progress. Further investigation by the practitioner, together with the child's parents, may show that the child needs extra support.

- Sharing children's stages of progress with parents

A learning journey portfolio provides something that an early years worker and a child's parents can look at together so that they talk about what the child has achieved and what they think they should be helping them to achieve next. It is also a good way for parents to appreciate how home and family lifestyle and activities provide rich contexts for learning and for practitioners to value the learning that takes place outside their setting.

- Planning to further children's progress

A learning journey portfolio includes a written record that provides a clear statement about what a particular child has achieved over a period of time. This embraces all the six areas of learning for children from birth to five years of age, or at least as long as they have been in your setting. It will also contain key pieces of evidence that demonstrate the significant achievements the child has made. This can be referred to when deciding possible next steps, or lines of direction, to help further the child's development and learning.

Presenting assessment in an attractive and meaningful way means that parents and children will enjoy contributing to it as well as looking back on it in years to come.

A learning journey portfolio is a colourful and attractive way of celebrating a child's achievements, their development and their learning. It is something that a child can be proud of and which parents will value, sharing it with grandparents and friends. There are many different ways of building a portfolio.

- How to build a learning journey portfolio

There is no single method for creating a portfolio of children's progress. The method chosen by any particular early years setting should enable the records to fulfil the purposes that have just been described.

Some settings may use a scrapbook or a folder with plastic pockets. Others have found that even the largest of these is sometimes too small to effectively present children's work, and make a portfolio of A2-sized cardboard, covered and decorated, to keep material either loose-leaf or bound with ribbons or raffia.

Digital technology offers practitioners another medium for creating learning journey portfolios. It helps get around the difficulty of including children's 'big work', such as large paintings or models, which can be photographed, inserted into an electronic document and stored on a computer. At the same time, having a workbox where children's big work can be stored before being taken home is a good idea. Some things that children make, such as models with building bricks or natural materials, cannot always be kept, so photographs are a useful means of capturing a record of the process and the end result.

An ongoing record can be built up or shorter snapshot portfolios can be made that document an event or a process over time. These are sometimes called Learning Story Boards. They are short documents which can be written as a narrative that describes a piece of learning back to the child. These can be made available in an accessible place in the setting so that children can look at them and reflect on what they have been doing. They are also useful to document a group process between a number of children, with photographs and text that describes what the children did in a group activity, which creates a story of an aspect of their shared learning that they can look back on.

Learning story boards can also be used as a display that documents learning processes and activities, or events that children have taken part in. The capturing of the learning process is important as the end product does not always make clear what route the children took to get there, what they said and did and how the event grew into the final outcome. The point is not so much 'Look what I made' but 'Look at how I am making this'. This is the learning process in action.

Learning journey storyboards and portfolios serve as records of achievement to be shared with the children and parents; key people can celebrate the achievements with the children and parents and talk with them about what they might achieve next. Having access to the children's records of achievement will help parents and key people to work together to decide on possible next steps for progressing the children's development and how they can help children to achieve the goals.

- Storing portfolios

Children's portfolios are usually kept separately as they are ongoing records that need to be accessed by staff, parents and children.

All parents should have an equal opportunity to access the information in their child's portfolio. It will therefore be important for it to be stored in a way that enables them to access it. This will mean making some information available in parents' preferred written languages where possible, and ensuring access to written records is not the only means of sharing information about children's progress. In addition to supporting access to the portfolio, there should be opportunities for parents to talk with early years staff and, in particular, with their child's key person or the member of staff responsible for looking after their child's records.

Giving children access to their record files in this way enables them to have a stake in them. Children are eager to grow and develop. If children's records of achievement and the plans for their progress are shared with them, children can be involved in deciding for themselves that a particular piece of their work should be added to the evidence in the file. Supporting the children's interest in what is in their portfolio serves several useful purposes:

- It supports the children's developing sense of their own autonomy.

- It prevents the record-keeping process from being seen - by children or parents - as a negative search for weaknesses rather than a positive celebration of strengths.

- It can counter any negative feelings children might already have about themselves. By helping them to see all the ways they are making progress, it can give them confidence that progress is possible, even in areas they find more difficult.

This is an edited extract from The New Child in Focus, published by the Pre-school Learning Alliance

INFORMATION

Published by the PLA, The New Child in Focus aims to equip early years practitioners with a deeper understanding of children's learning and the tools needed to implement an effective planning and assessment cycle. To order a copy (£17.95 to non-members; £13.55 to members) call 020 7697 2595, e-mail info@pre-school.org.uk, or visit www.pre-school.org.uk/shop