Early Years Resources: Assessment in the Early Years

The 2012-13 Curriculum

Showing progress in the Early Years has always been difficult. The previous system of using profile points allowed practitioners to show numerical progress for all children from Nursery to end of Reception.

Many children would start in Reception at level 2 or 3, and would progress through the levels until they finished Reception.

Unfortunately, there is no current numerical method for showing progress nationally.

For our own records, in our Reception class we are trying to make sure we keep meticulous records of phonics, literacy and mathematics. I thought I would share some of my assessment sheets to help out other practitioners.

	Writing Assessment Record Sheet We have split up the basic statements for the writing targets from 30-50 months all the way to a 2c on curriculum targets. We looked at the main process the children go through to be able to write independently and put it into a table that we can use to help us guide our planning and to track pupil progress.
	Phonics Assessment Record Sheet This sheet is one in which you can input the children’s total scores for the term. So, if they know 12/20 phase 2 phonemes and so on, and tracks the progress they have made from the previous term. Obviously leave the progress columns empty if those areas haven’t been tested yet.
	Reading Assessment Record As the children begin to use their phonemes to decode words for reading and also begin to recognise more words, this assessment sheet allows the user to track progress through terms and also see where the children are currently.
	Number Writing and Reading Assessment Record I do like to keep specific records to help with my planning. I find it’s easy to waste time teaching children things they already know. This sheet allows me to target specific children with specific number recognition which I can jot down in my planning. It doesn’t actually take that long, either.
	Catch as You Can Observation Sheets These sheets could be completed by your Learning Through Play Manager, as they are working with children. However, we don’t want to be filling in sheets when we should be moving children’s learning on so I recommend targetting specific children, perhaps children who need more help or children who are gifted and talented to use these sheets as effectively as possible.
	Magic Moments We keep Learning Journey scrap books at our setting, where maths, literacy and topic work, photographs and magic moments are collected and displayed to show children’s progress through the year. The magic moments cards capture special moments the children share with you. For example, today I was invited to a space party so I asked the child what happened at a space party and wrote down what he said on the magic moment card. This will later be stuck into his Learning Journey The magic moments cards are fantastic ways of capturing sweet things the children say and making notes about their progress through snapshots.