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Across all five domains

5-year-olds

Child approaches the world with curiosity and develops knowledge about specific topics.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Recognizes their peers’ knowledge and asks them about things that they are experts in
  • Asks scientific questions (e.g., what happens to the caterpillar when it is in the chrysalis)
  • Believes that there is one objective truth about a subject and thinks that if others have a different interpretation, they do not know the truth

Child pursues their own goals.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Takes care of classroom chores without being asked (e.g., throws out napkin after snack)
  • Develops a play idea day after day (e.g., child returns to block area to continue a construction and play scenario that has been developed throughout the week)
  • Advocates for their plot ideas when engaged in dramatic play with peers (e.g., when playing hospital in the dramatic play area, child asserts that the patient should be cured, while peer thinks they should die)

Child focuses on tasks and perseveres in accomplishing them.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Attends to open-ended tasks that they are interested in for a minimum of 20- 30 minutes
  • Pauses work to get up to talk to their peers
  • Rebuilds their elaborate block structure after it has been knocked down
  • Tries several different ways of solving a problem (e.g., tries making a bridge with blocks to drive a car over, and when it falls, tries a new foundation so that it will support the cars)

Child uses their imagination to create and invent.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Adds detail to creations (e.g., makes a clay bird with wings and a beak)
  • Asks more experienced people for advice about their creations (e.g., discusses ways to build stairs with an educator and then uses their advice)
  • Uses writing to add detail to their projects (e.g., includes a stop sign in their block construction)
  • Makes detailed and elaborate costumes for pretend play

Child uses and coordinates their large muscle groups.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Skips using alternating feet
  • Walks backwards
  • Turns somersaults
  • Catches a playground ball from 3 feet away
  • Balances on either foot
  • Walks up and down stairs while holding an object
  • Moves confidently around an obstacle course, maintaining balance while stopping and turning

Child controls the small muscles in their hands and wrists.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Consistently uses their right or left hand
  • Tears a small piece of tape off a tape dispenser
  • Uses scissors with one hand to cut out shapes
  • Uses pencil to copy many shapes and letters; these may be overly large or rough looking but the letter will be apparent
  • Spins a top
  • Zips up own coat

The child uses sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, proprioception (deep pressure), and vestibular function (balance) to perceive and respond to the world around them.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Developing left-to-right visual tracking
  • Moves around the learning environment easily and successfully
  • Spends time moving their body into different positions (e.g., upside down)

Child cares for their physical well-being.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Manages the contents of their backpack (e.g., takes out their folder and hangs it on their hook when they arrive in school)
  • Gets lunch on their tray or their lunchbox from their backpack and eats without prompting during lunch time
  • Safely manages increasing levels of risk in physical play

Child develops a healthy relationship to their body, pleasure, and others. This healthy sense of self is supported and demonstrated through respectful, caring, and loving relationships with families, educators, and other children.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Uses correct names for parts of the body
  • May be familiar with exploring genitals but still have questions about their functions
  • Understands that certain bodily activities have particular times and places, and accepts limits (e.g., may pick their nose in the bathroom)
  • Explores the idea of family and marriage, and understands that some adults are married and that some are not; is aware that there are lots of different ways to make a family

Child develops trusting relationships with nurturing adults.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Interacts with significant adults outside of the family and classroom (e.g., speaks with the bus driver and cook)
  • Seeks guidance from family members, educators, and other familiar adults
  • Transitions into unfamiliar settings with the assistance of a familiar adult

Child experiences a sense of belonging in environments that link, extend, and affirm the child’s family and community. Child expresses comfort and joy with human diversity.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • When a child’s home culture or experience differs from the dominant or mainstream culture, they may
    • Reject their home culture and adopt the dominant one
    • Reject dominant culture and insist on home culture
    • Learn to adjust behavior and to become bi-cultural
  • W hen a child’s home culture and experience has been affirmed, they may express pride in their racial, linguistic and cultural identity
  • When a child’s home culture or experience aligns with dominant or mainstream culture, they may
    • Internalize a false sense that they are “normal” or superior
  • Prefers a child who speaks their own language or language variation as a friend

Child develops a sense of self through noticing and developing their own interests, preferences, and abilities. Child increasingly develops self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social identities.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Identifies and expresses own interests, preferences, and abilities
  • Confidently expresses likes and dislikes
  • Has unrealistic positive overestimations of their own abilities
  • Compares or contrasts self to others (e.g., physical characteristics, preferences, abilities, and feelings)

Child forms deep, caring, human connections by imagining what someone else may be thinking or feeling and responding with care. Child recognizes unfairness and understands that unfairness hurts.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Begins to recognize how own actions affect others
  • Listens to viewpoints of others
  • Offers support to another child or shows concern when a peer is upset (e.g., “I see you’re sad. Do you want to play with me?”)
  • Develops their own theories about social inequities (e.g., why some groups of people tend to have more money and decision-making power than others)

Child navigates friendships with peers through cooperation and negotiation.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Shares, take turns, and cooperates in a group
  • Listens to others’ ideas and wants; shares own ideas and wants
  • Understands that sometimes you are a leader, and sometimes you are a follower
  • Plays simple card games that require turn-taking and waiting

Child expresses and manages their feelings and impulses.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Often expresses strong feelings in socially and culturally accepted ways
  • Identifies emotions and uses words to describe them
  • Describes why people may feel differently about the same situation
  • Intentionally uses humor (e.g., begins to tell jokes)
  • Begins to understand and explain reactions to certain circumstances

Child follows the rhythms, rules, and routines of the learning environment.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Changes actions to meet expectations of different settings (e.g., takes off shoes at home but wears shoes at school)
  • Applies familiar rules in new but similar situations (e.g., uses a quiet voice inside)
  • Adapts to new environment by behaving and displaying emotions in expected ways (e.g., goes to a new friend’s house and is able to be calm, share, and take turns)

Child will develop the ability to speak and/ or sign in increasingly complete, complex, precise, and varied ways.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Initiates and maintains a conversation with peers for exchanges over longer periods of time
  • Talks about language, as in “I know Spanish,” or “I think that is what you said.”
  • Responds to the question, “What did you say?”
  • Uses increasingly complex sentence structure to express thoughts (“I am going to the hospital, but I’m pretending. I’m not going to have the baby. The mommy is going to have the baby.”)
  • Talks in different ways depending on place and listener
  • Tells simple stories

Child will develop their ability to listen and understand complete, complex, precise, and varied language.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Responds to multi-step directions or requests (e.g., “First, wash your hands. Then bring me the green towel, and then we will have snack.”)
  • Observes and interprets details about environment, events, or speakers
  • Understands words for time, like “yesterday,” “today,” and “tomorrow”
  • Role plays familiar events described by others, such as a friend’s story
  • Understands forms of social speech from their family, culture and community

Child uses language to relate to others according to the social expectations of their family, community, and culture.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Pays attention to speaker in a conversation
  • Takes turns during group conversations, raising hand to speak, with reminders
  • Emergent multilingual children gauge and then speak in the dominant language of communication used by the person with whom they are speaking
  • Provides additional information to clarify when listener does not understand the child’s meaning
  • Uses language to persuade or to state an opinion
  • Uses body language, facial expressions, and tone to predict behavior
  • Tells stories with characters and a more complex sense of structure to events and actions

Child enjoys, attends to, understands, and makes meanings from spoken and written language of storytelling and books.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Expresses an opinion about a story
  • Compares stories with one another (e.g., “In all the Skippy Jon Jones books, Skippy goes on adventures in his closet.”)
  • Asks questions about the stories and texts
  • Makes predictions about what will happen in stories or texts based on adult modeling
  • Responds to stories or texts by incorporating characters and narratives from them into dramatic play
  • Uses books to learn more about topics of interest (e.g., creates a map of the subway system based on text and their lived experience)

Child develops the ability to recognize and manipulate the different sounds in spoken language(s).

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Demonstrates awareness that spoken language is composed of smaller sound segments (e.g., labels a drawing using initial sounds)
  • Shows word awareness by isolating a single word from a sentence
  • Produces one or more words that rhyme with another word (e.g., “What rhymes with log?”)
  • Provides a word that fits with a group of words sharing an initial sound (e.g., “Sock, Sara, and Song all start with the /s/ sound. What else starts with the /s/ sound?”)
  • Produces the sounds made by many letters
  • Uses initial and some final sounds in invented spelling (e.g. writes, “IATK” For “I ate cake”)
  • Emergent multilingual children show awareness of sounds from home language(s)

Child uses materials and/ or language to make meaning for themselves and/or an audience.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Collaborates on shared writing (e.g., contributes a sentence to a class letter thanking the custodial staff)
  • Uses drawing and invented spelling to tell an original story of connected events or related ideas on a topic
  • Shares expertise about a topic of interest though a verbal presentation, drawing, and/ or writing
  • Collaborates with peers to recount an event, each child adding to the story
  • Plans and extends dramatic and symbolic play with peers
  • Develops characters and settings within dramatic play
  • Composes messages that approximate the features and qualities of scripts in more precise ways (e.g., writes more recognizable letters; writes from left to right in English)

Child views, creates, and makes meaning of visual communication and multimedia documentation, which includes drawings, collections, photographs, videos and displays.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Plans to use multimedia documentation to record and extend their work in the learning environment
  • Reflects on accuracy of visual documentation (e.g., looks at a picture of a dinosaur and says, “I think they were even bigger than that.”)

Child develops the ability to store, retrieve, and share information about past experiences.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Retells an important life event in sequential order (e.g., draws a picture about something they did during summer vacation)
  • Believes that they can remember much more than they really can
  • Describes how memory works (e.g., says, “It’s easier to remember something that happened yesterday than something that happened last month.”)

Child becomes a scientific thinker by manipulating objects, asking questions, making observations and predictions, and developing generalizations.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Asks “how” things were made (e.g., “How does a pigeon build a nest?”)
  • Generates ideas about how to find the answers to their questions (e.g., when wanting to learn more about trucks, the child decides to ask a family member who drives a truck)
  • Lists materials needed for an experiment
  • Records information from an experience (e.g., drawing, writing, storytelling, photographing)

Child understands and explores the causes and effects of actions and events.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Predicts an outcome based on previous effects they have observed (“If we leave the seeds on the top of the dirt, the birds will come eat them.”)
  • Seeks but does not readily accept scientific causes for things

Child plans and uses hands, tools, and technology to solve problems with materials.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe
  • Uses blocks to build stairs
  • Sticks with a problem-solving strategy that has been successful before, without considering other alternatives
  • Plans how to make a functional object from materials (e.g., a spinning top from Lego pieces)
  • Replicates engineering solutions from life in play (e.g., creating a door with a latch for a cardboard house)
G

Math

1. Comparing and Categorizing

Child recognizes some similarities and differences between familiar and unfamiliar people, objects, or experiences.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool
What educators might observe
  • Sorts by a single attribute and reclassifies according to another attribute (e.g., sorts writing implements by type and then re-sorts them by color)
  • Arranges 5–10 objects shortest to longest, biggest to smallest, or heaviest to lightest
  • Compares number of objects by counting, even when one of the objects is bigger, up to 10

2. Number Sense and Quantity

Child understands and explores numbers and quantity.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool
What educators might observe
  • Quickly names the number of objects in groups of five without counting
  • Tells what number comes after any number between one and 20
  • Explains that numbers tell “how many” of something
  • Recognizes and writes numerals 1 through 10
  • Divides up to 20 objects between four or five people by dealing out an object to each person
  • Uses the words “first,” “second,” “third,” up to and including “tenth” (e.g., says, “I came in fourth” when describing a race with classmates
  • Counts on their fingers
  • Keeps track of objects that have and have not been counted (e.g., slides objects they have already counted to the side)
  • Counts backward from 10 by taking away objects

3. Patterning

Child develops the ability to identify, describe, extend, and create patterns.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool
What educators might observe
  • Creates and identifies simple repeating patterns (e.g., draws a pattern of hearts and stars around the edge of their picture)
  • Creates and extends simple growing patterns (e.g., stacks one, then two, then three blocks to make a staircase)
  • Explains growing patterns such as the pattern of “plus one” in addition (“If I add one, I get the next number.”)
  • Describes a “jump, jump, clap” movement as two of something then one of something
  • Pays attention to the linguistic patterns in the names of numbers, “Four, forty, and four hundred all sound like four!”

4. Spatial Sense and Geometry

Child understands how objects, points, lines, and shapes fit in space.

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool
What educators might observe
  • Correctly uses position words such as “beside,” “under,” and “inside” to describe objects
  • Slides, flips and turns pieces to make them fit in a puzzle, but does not always move them in the right direction at first
  • Recognizes that there are other shapes that are not common (e.g., rhombus and hexagon)
  • Spontaneously creates symmetrical buildings in the block area
  • Builds complex bridges with multiple arches, ramps, and stairs at the ends
  • Intentionally puts pattern block shapes together to make another shape for a picture

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