Assessment and Record Keeping... Please help!

[SLIMBRIDGE]

Hi all,

I could really do with some advice... I am a Reception teacher but I also 'lead' our on site pre-school. We are using Tapestry successfully in Reception but at the moment we don't have enough technology to use it in pre-school. So, people who aren't using Tapestry, how do you keep your records? The pre-school staff currently keep paper Learning Journals but they are concerned these don't show exactly where each child is without ploughing through pages and pages, and that they make it difficult to plan next steps. They aren't currently highlighting Development Matters and they are not sure if they should be... I feel rather out of my depth and they are asking me for advice, but I'm not being very much help to them! Really need some advice from people more knowledgeable than I am with pre-school. Sorry for the ramble, hope this makes sense!

[Foreveryoung]

When we had paper journals each child had a file each not hard back just one of those floppy see through front ones, they were set up like this:

 

Front page - name, DOB, school entry year, start date

 

Contact page - a table heading date / info, we used this to log mtgs with parents, info they shared or where we brought anything to their attention

 

Polly pocket - parent contact - put in here any thing sent back from parents, reviews etc

 

polly pocket - next steps - next step sheets newest ontop

 

Polly pocket - any reports

 

Ecat

 

Tracking sheets - we had 8 one for each area of learning and a characteristic log

 

Polly pocket for each term - labelled term spring 2014 etc - this had in it all observations logged not in order just all popped in here for that term

 

Each obs had area reference logged on it and date this was cross referenced to tracking sheets by way of date next to statement, therefore an obs could be sought by going to correct poly pocket. Photos were put in a make shift photo album once cross referenced.

Areas were highlighted off in the tracker sheets using pink - summer,green - spring and orange - autumn. Yellow was used for enter data. We found this very effective to just open up the sheets and see it in colour you could easily see any gaps, next steps, progression.

 

Long winded but hope it helps x

Edited January 19, 2015 by Foreveryoung

[SLIMBRIDGE]

That is really useful thank you, will share with them.

[woodlands1997]

We have a progress booklet made by sound learning - should come up if you google it. It has all the phrases from the EYFS that we write evidence under and stick in photos etc too to support this. Then we have a tracker grid that gets highlighted termly. I use prams to collate the data myself and give each key worker the overview of their children for the half term - this gives a good visual picture! We don't have the resources to use tapestry throughout and to be honest the way we do it now suits everyone so don't see any point in changing it!

[Guest]

We do a photo scraprbook for each child, OBS on post it notes linking area and coel. Obs are spontaneous or are based on what we observe for our weekly objective led planning. We have just started to highlight early years outcomes statements (each area on one sheet) using our knowledge of child, obs and photos, parent info etc as we have found without this we were trawling through the OBS to make a judgement on where the child typically lay. Its more for our benefit to see easily at a glance where gaps are also. We then enter our judgements onto prams as we have no WiFi. We then produce summary reports and do progress reports evey term using prams. We use our own judgents and early years outcomes for setting next steps. We give parents a report at end of term using an all about me form and they add to it also.a copy of this is also kept in their file. Working well at the moment.