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Early Learning Guidelines

Across all five domains

6-year-olds

Stage Infants Toddlers Preschool Early elementary
Age 0–9 months 8–16 months 15–24 months 24–36 months 3-year-olds 4-year-olds 5-year-olds 6-year-olds 7-year-olds 8-year-olds
Domain All domains I. Approaches to Learning II. Physical Well-Being, Health and Motor Development III. Social and Emotional Development IV. Communication, Language, and Literacy V. Cognitive Development
Show Both What educators might observe Ways educators might support the child's development
I

Approaches to Learning

A

Curiosity and Interest

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Include time in the daily schedule during which children may follow their own ideas to make, build, and compose their own works
  • Allow students access to a variety of materials to pursue their interests:
    • Blocks and ramps
    • Writing and drawing materials
    • Books
    • Legos
    • Clay
    • Math manipulatives
  • Visit the library with children and show them how to look for books related to their topics of interest
B

Initiative

Child pursues their own goals.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Include a writing area in the learning environment that has multiple and varied tools, materials, and resources (e.g., different types of paper and blank books with a few lines on each page for children to draw and write their own stories)
  • Engage children in conversation about their own goals
  • Discuss problems and plan solutions; ask for the child(ren)’s ideas for plans of action and document these in writing or drawing
C

Persistence and Attentiveness

Child focuses on tasks and perseveres in accomplishing them.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Provide large, uninterrupted time blocks for work on projects
  • Ask children to share work in progress, reflect on their process, and plan aloud their next steps; other children can offer suggestions for next steps
  • Create areas in the classroom for “works in progress”
D

Creativity and Inventiveness

Child uses their imagination to create and invent.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Include “choice time” in the daily schedule during which the child has access to a variety of materials and may follow their own idea for a project
  • Provide familiar tools such as scissors, rulers, tape, and glue for work
  • Document and facilitate children in recording their work with photographs, drawings, and writing; reflect on the process of creating
  • Introduce the formal vocabularies of music, dance, and visual arts
II

Physical Well-Being, Health and Motor Development

A

Large Motor Skills

Child uses and coordinates their large muscle groups.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Sing songs or chants with some dance steps to practice galloping, skipping, side stepping, walking in rhythm, such as
    • “Skip to My Lou”
    • “Going to Boston”
    • “El Juego Chirimbolo”
    • “Sasha 1-2-3”
    • “Little Johnnie Brown”
    • “Funga Alaffia”
  • Provide structured gross motor breaks throughout the day
  • Provide unstructured, outdoor recess time each day
B

Small Motor Skills

Child controls the small muscles in their hands and wrists.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Include materials in the learning environment that foster fine motor skills
    • Legos
    • Geoboards
    • Clay
    • Yarn
    • Sewing materials
    • Hand looms
    • Scissors
    • Hole punches
    • Hammer and nails
    • Drill
    • Pliers
C

Sensory Integration

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Support children in developing self-awareness about their sensory preferences
  • Honor children’s requests for quieter environments, movement breaks, or alternative seating
  • Reflect with colleagues on options available to children during recess, and add elements to the outdoor environment as necessary
D

Self-Care

Child cares for their physical well-being.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Offer healthy snacks and ask children to try unfamiliar or non-preferred foods
  • Provide independent access to Band- Aids
  • Provide sufficient time for children to independently put on their own coat, hat, and gloves
  • Make plans about what a child should do if separated from the group during outings
  • When practicing fire, lockdown, and other drills with children
    • Invite children to express their fears and provide reassurance and emotional support
    • Inform families that there was a drill
    • Provide families with information about how to address children’s fears about safety at school
E

Healthy Sexuality

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.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Check in with families about children’s curiosity regarding partnerships and sexuality
  • Explore the changing and growing body by comparing photos of when children were younger with what they look like now
  • Be sensitive to the variety of family configurations in the classroom in your words and actions (e.g., avoid saying, “Go home and tell your moms and dads.”)
  • Nurture children’s positive self-image; draw self portraits and talk about what they love and appreciate about their bodies
III

Social and Emotional Development

A

Trusting Relationships with Adults

Child develops trusting relationships with nurturing adults.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Help children and families identify and develop supportive relationships with family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, community members, and service providers
  • Model language of assistance and support (“How can we work together to figure this out?”)
B

Sense of Belonging

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.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Convey to families that you respect them as their child’s best advocate
  • Create opportunities for children to know each other by interviewing each child in a group as part of a name study or family study
  • Incorporate the four goals of Anti-Bias Education (listed below) into the daily curriculum
    • Each child will demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride, and positive social identities
    • Each child will express comfort and joy with human diversity; accurate language for human differences; and deep, caring human connections
    • Each child will increasingly recognize unfairness, have language to describe unfairness, and understand that unfairness hurts
    • Each child will demonstrate empowerment and the skills to act, with others or alone, against prejudice and/or discriminatory actions
C

Sense of Self

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.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Create time for children to share their work, either before or after a working period; allow children to choose the work they want to share
  • Display children’s work with their words of guidance or explanation beside it
  • Create structures for children to show their interests and preferences, such as choice time
  • Make time for reflective conversations (“How are you doing in our classroom routines? How is reading going?”)
  • Avoid asking children to line up or choose partners by gender
D

Empathy

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.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Observe that life seems easier for some people and harder for others, and explore with children the reasons for these inequities; teach that inequities are not a consequence of anything that marginalized people did wrong
  • Teach children to show compassion and support for their peers
  • Assume children’s good intentions
  • When children come to educator with an interpersonal conflict, ask them to start resolving it by first trying to imagine and articulate how the other party feels, and then invite them to articulate to each other how they really feel
E

Cooperation and Negotiation

Child navigates friendships with peers through cooperation and negotiation.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Consider shared interest among children as basis for connection; children who like to build, children who like to read about animals, etc
  • Suggest out-of-school time connections for families
  • Offer shared language for respectful conversation, including respectful disagreeing: (“I disagree” rather than “No! You’re wrong!”)
  • Read books about cooperation and negotiation, such as
    • Click , Clack, Moo: Cows That Type , by Doreen Cronin
    • Cat and Rat , by Ed Young
    • The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig , by Eugene Trivizas
F

Emotional Self-Regulation

Child expresses and manages their feelings and impulses.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Read books about self-control, such as:
    • Sophie Gets Angry , Really, Really Angry , by Molly Bang
    • Ahn’s Anger , by Gail Silver
    • Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse , by Kevin Henkes
  • Discuss the books with the children, asking
    • Have you ever felt the same way as ___?
    • What would you do if you were ___?
    • What would you say to___?
  • Create strategy charts for feelings, impulses, and ways to act on them
G

Rhythms, Rules, and Routines

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Reflect on your own cultural expectations related to discipline
  • Create some routines together; ask children, for example, how they think an area could best be organized and use their input to create some routine procedures
  • Decide on logical consequences for rules with all staff; reconsider the use of social exclusion as a consequence
IV

Communication, Language, and Literacy

A

Speaking

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Provide opportunities for children to engage in informal talk throughout the day
  • Provide opportunities for children to use new content area vocabulary in conversation and with their family by sending home conversation starters (e.g., “Ask your child about the geodes we opened today in science.”)
  • When children are engaged in a content area like visual arts, repeatedly use vocabulary specific to their processes, such as “perspectives” and “dimensions”
B

Listening and Understanding

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Listen and provide feedback to clarify and extend understanding; for instance, restate in another way or use an image or a gesture to clarify
  • Engage peers in a variety of activities in a range of different topics that foster sustained interactions
  • Use translanguaging between English and home languages to encourage participation and keep children in the conversational loop
  • Make comparisons with familiar characters and plots to sustain interactions
C

Social Communication

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Talk to families about children’s use of social language outside of school; Find out if a child who is quiet at school is talkative at home or in their community
  • Observe emergent multilingual children’s use of social language when they are speaking in their home language
  • During read-aloud time, invite predictions about characters’ relationships and interactions (“What might this character say to this one if she has that feeling?”)
D

Engaging with Stories and Books

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Engage in extended conversation and dialogue about what children notice when they read
  • Listen to what children say in response to open-ended questions and clarify, expand, or extend their ideas
  • Ask peers to respond to other children’s questions and comments about their reading
  • Use self-talk to model making connections to a story
  • Ask children if they have ever had an experience similar to the character in the story
  • Ask children to draw a picture in response to a story they heard read aloud
E

Phonological Awareness

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Explore sounds of the alphabet by playing a clapping game (“When I say a word that starts with an “m,” clap your hands!”)
  • Create an activity in which children can listen to beginning and ending sounds, noting the difference between each
F

Composing

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Brainstorm ideas for compositions with children
  • Make time for children to share a scene or to act out parts of a story for a peer audience with props
  • Celebrate children’s completed compositions with a publishing party
G

Creating and Interpreting Multimedia Texts

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Identify museums and galleries to visit with children
  • Invite children to use drawing as a way to look closely at sculptures
  • Invite a visual artist or filmmaker to visit the classroom
  • Create a slideshow of documentation from the learning environment and share it with children each Friday
V

Cognitive Development

A

Understanding Stability and Change

Child recognizes and develops the ability to explain how material objects change and how they remain stable.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Include books in the learning environment that help children understand death
    • And So It Goes , by Paloma Valdivia
    • Goodbye Mog , by Judith Kerr
    • The Goodbye Book , by Todd Parr
    • Ida Always , by Caron Levis and Charles Santoso;
    • The Dead Bird , by Margaret Wise Brown
  • Read non-fiction books about the life cycles of familiar animals (such as cats, dogs, and other animals that children see in their communities); explore rituals and routines for having pets and for pet deaths
B

Representing

Child uses symbolic thought to represent.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Ask families about cultural or religious prohibitions to representation; create a welcoming and inclusive learning environment
  • Invite children to use collage materials to make dollhouses out of cardboard boxes and make characters to inhabit the dollhouses
  • Sing songs with space for children’s contributions and allow them to write new verses
  • Create visual art while listening to different types of music
C

Memory and History

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Include books in the learning environment that tell stories from history
    • Histories of the children’s national and cultural groups (e.g., history of Taíno people)
    • Biographies (e.g., Obama, Lincoln)
    • Stories of historical events (e.g., The March on Washington)
    • Descriptions of life at different periods of history (e.g., prehistoric man)
    • Invite elders to the classroom to talk about their memories
D

Investigating and Exploring

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Use photography to gather observations over time; for example, observe a tree through several seasons or watch a pumpkin over the weeks around harvest, and ask children to come up with theories about why changes occur
  • Ask children to do research by looking in books for answers to their questions
  • Question the child’s reasoning to explore their thought process, but without concern for correctness (“What makes you think that? How did you figure that out?”)
E

Understanding Cause and Effect

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Ask children why the water in a clear or open container left on the heater or windowsill diminishes over a few days
  • Plant beans in a plastic bag lined with a wet paper towel; ask why some grow and some do not
F

Engineering: Problem-solving with Materials

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Include tools in the learning environment that children can access for a variety of purposes
    • scissors
    • staplers
    • hole punches
    • hammers
    • measuring tapes
    • hand drills
  • Invite children to systematically test the stability of their block buildings by rolling balls at them
  • Offer encouragement and guidance (“These problems can be solved! You can figure this out. What if you…?”)
G

Math

1. Comparing and Categorizing

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Offer objects for comparison and categorization
    • Photos of animals
    • Collections of rocks or leaves
    • Keys
    • Buttons
  • Engage children in using categorization for social good; for example, categorize recycling materials
  • Provide unit blocks and rulers for measurement
  • Create activities to measure distance (e.g., hold a paper airplane contest, then chart the results in a graph)

2. Number Sense and Quantity

Child understands and explores numbers and quantity.

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Create a number line adding one number each day for the whole year, and use it to practice counting by ones, twos, fives, and tens
  • Offer structures like a 100’s chart or number line sections for organizing number systems
  • Play games in which children roll a dice or spin a spinner and move a piece along a path
  • Provide strong context for solving problems with numbers (With 23 children in the class, does everyone have a snack if you have 18 snacks? How many more we need or how many extra do we have?)

3. Patterning

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Continue to notice patterns in the world on numbered streets and avenues or windows on buildings
  • Model addition with materials to ground math ideas in concrete experience; use two colors of tiles to show the commutative property of addition (two green and three red is five tiles; three green and two red is still five tiles)
  • Invite children to make patterns while stringing with small beads or weaving

4. Spatial Sense and Geometry

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

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Look at maps with children and encourages them to describe
    • Direction—which way?
    • Distance—how far?
    • Location—where?
    • Identification—what objects?
    • Coordinates—what are they?
  • Encourage children to make representations out of pattern blocks (for example, a ship with a smoke stack and rhombus-shaped smoke); they may trace their pattern block images to create pattern block puzzles for one another
  • Read books by Rebecca Emberly and others that show how to represent objects with different shapes

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