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Across all five domains

8-year-olds

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Conducts research based on a topic of interest
  • Uses prior knowledge to develop research questions (e.g., learns about how fish spawn eggs and then decides to find out about the reproductive cycle of amphibians)
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Talk with families and children about the interests they are pursuing at home
  • Provide access to books and computer resources for children to use in researching their own interests and questions
  • Provide graphic organizers to support children in researching their own questions and curiosities and in using information to create their own works

Child pursues their own goals.

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

What educators might observe
  • Recognizes that trying something new may be difficult at first
  • Independently determines direction for their future learning (e.g., decides that they would like to learn to play the guitar)
  • Considers alternatives before beginning a project
  • Knows what their own talents are and offers to use them to help others
  • Evaluates their progress on their goals
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Talk with families and children about skills the child is developing outside of school, such as the ability to play soccer
  • Notice when children are taking initiative, and invest time and resources in helping them to achieve ambitious goals
  • Provide models of individuals who noticed a problem and decided to act
  • Engage children in service learning projects

Child focuses on tasks and perseveres in accomplishing them.

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

What educators might observe
  • Screens out distractions and concentrates on relevant information as they work
  • Makes a decision about how to work so they will be able to focus
  • Decides to step away from a challenge when frustrated and then returns to it
  • Organizes long-term projects (e.g., begins a project by gathering supporting texts)
  • Revises their writing, checking for meaning, spelling, and punctuation
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Notice and provide encouragement when children feel frustrated or impatient (e.g., “I see that this is taking longer than you expected, and sometimes when we have to take many steps to solve a problem, we get tired!”)
  • Acknowledge persistence (e.g., “Wow, you are wrestling with that long text! I bet you are learning so much. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts about it.”)
  • View mistakes as learning opportunities (e.g., “I love seeing your work on this problem; every time I see you find a mistake and use a new strategy, I know your brain is growing!”)
  • Reach out to families to help with establishing a routine for homework time and modeling positive support

Child uses their imagination to create and invent.

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

What educators might observe
  • Presents an idea for a creative project to the group and then waits for the group’s feedback and incorporates their ideas
  • Considers how objects appear from points of view not their own (e.g., tries drawing a picture from a bird’s-eye perspective)
  • Incorporates ideas from cultures they have learned about into their creations
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Create opportunities for children to work collaboratively on creative projects over the course of several weeks
  • Facilitate group reflection on projects, exploring what children noticed, what observations they made, and what they learned about working together
  • Provide more specialized tools and materials for use in making projects
    • Scales to compare weights
    • Graphite pencils
    • Chalk pastels
    • Editing software
  • Visit museums and libraries to learn about varieties of art -making and engineering

Child uses and coordinates their large muscle groups.

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

What educators might observe
  • Shows good form in basic movement even when participating in fast-moving games
  • Dribbles ball forward
  • Runs forward while tossing a ball back and forth with a peer
  • Mirrors partner’s movements in a dance
  • Tosses a ball to themselves and hits it with a bat
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Talk to families about the importance of gross motor play during out-of-school time
  • Connect families to local opportunities to participate in sports (e.g., soccer leagues, local playgrounds, public swimming pools)
  • Create opportunities for children to learn and practice dances from their families’ communities and cultures

Child controls the small muscles in their hands and wrists.

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

What educators might observe
  • Folds paper into simple origami shapes
  • Cuts out complex shapes
  • Print has a consistent shape and size
  • Learns cursive
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Invite a calligrapher to visit the class to demonstrate the beauty of writing
  • Encourage children to pay attention to handwriting in the final revision of their writing projects
  • Continue to provide time for activities designed to strengthen the muscles in children’s hands
  • Provide keyboards for children whose fine motor skills interfere with their ability to express themselves in writing

Child cares for their physical well-being.

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

What educators might observe
  • Asks questions about laws and regulations that make the community safe
  • Intervenes when they see a child breaking a safety rule (e.g., attempts to stop a child who is about to ride a bicycle without a helmet)
  • Is aware that different educators and families have different rules, and they should follow the rules of the adults who they are with
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Talk with families about chores that children are expected to do in their family and community
  • Invite children to help plan a snack menu and to prepare the snacks
  • Invite children to talk about dangers they have on the news or through social media
  • Engage children in thinking about the ways laws keep us safe and how laws could be changed to keep us more safe (e.g., gun control legislation)
  • Begin a conversation about helping one another stay safe

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.

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

What educators might observe
  • Some children’s bodies are changing (e.g., they may grow breast buds and/ or pubic hair)
  • Knows that many (but not all) grownups fall in love with (and sometimes marry) people of a different gender; understands that it’s not accurate to assume that all families have a mother and father and begins to explore many different family structures
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Monitor the comments you make about your own and other people’s bodies and appearance
  • Engage children in ongoing critical literacy activities that support them in developing the skills to analyze literature and media for sexism, sizism, and homophobia

Child develops trusting relationships with nurturing adults.

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

What educators might observe
  • Respectfully engages adult with a different viewpoint and considers adult’s alternative suggestions in conversation (e.g., listens to adult share views about a movie and offers a different viewpoint)
  • Volunteers to help educator with tasks (e.g., staple or hand out papers)
  • Identifies family, school, and community strengths and supports
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Foster the family’s positive regard for their child by taking a strength-based stance when sharing observations
  • When addressing sensitive issues with a child and/or their family, be sure to do so in privacy. Convey respect and compassion.
  • Thank the child for coming to you when they have a problem, and affirm your desire to be a resource for them

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.

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

What educators might observe
  • Exhibits understanding of larger concepts related to self and belonging (e.g., safety, respect, kindness, and care for objects, self, and others)
  • Identifies gender and racial stereotypes in books and media
  • Knows some historical facts about their family, community, and culture
  • May disengage from learning if they feel like they do not belong at school
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Suggest out-of-school time connections for children; recommend to families of specific children which classmates or afterschool programs may be good matches, and include this suggestion in mid-year reports and meetings
  • Create multiple opportunities each week for children to share personal experience with their classmates (e.g., include sharing about their lives or reading aloud personal narratives at daily morning meeting)
  • Provide class-wide opportunities for children to build their own social context
    • Write get-well notes to classmates who are ill for many days
    • Make “celebrating you” booklets on children’s birthdays in which each child contributes a note or drawing for the birthday child
  • Incorporate social justice into your curriculum, providing opportunities for children to engage in inquiry and action around social issues that they care about in their community

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.

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

What educators might observe
  • Reflects on and evaluates their own thinking and learning
  • Takes pride in individual accomplishments and respects accomplishment of others (e.g., “Your story was so detailed. I really liked it!”)
  • Plans for learning and physical needs ahead of time (e.g., brings their own stress ball to circle time)
  • Identifies role models who share some of their interests and marginalized group identities
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Invite students to plan for and participate in a conference with their families
  • Engage in casual conversation with the child about what they like to do outside of school
  • Provide time, space, and materials for chosen work and some choice within assigned work
  • Support and encourage students to participate in identity-based affinity groups
  • Notice and address opinions reflecting societal messages that equate material acquisitions with self-worth

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.

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

What educators might observe
  • Uses previous experiences when interpreting another person’s feelings (e.g., notices a child playing alone on the playground and invites them to play)
  • Observes and determines reactions of others when responding (e.g., The child remembers that their friend likes to be alone when they are frustrated and waits for them to calm down before approaching)
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Use shared reading to develop perspective-taking, asking, for example, “How would you help this character when they are feeling so worried?”
  • Provide opportunities for children to take meaningful action to address social inequity in their community
  • Offer children structured contexts in which to identify, practice, and receive empathy
    • Play a “jump in” theater game in which two characters act out a conflict and anyone is welcome to “jump in” as a third character to offer empathy to either or both parties if they see a way to help resolve the conflict

Child navigates friendships with peers through cooperation and negotiation.

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

What educators might observe
  • Values group membership and peer acceptance
  • Understands that friendships can remain even when disagreements occur
  • Balances needs and rights of others and their role in group work
  • Contemplates other viewpoints when resolving conflict
  • Independently follows the rules of a game to ensure fair play
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • When guiding children through conflict resolution, be alert to family and cultural differences in how people handle and navigate conflict
  • Foster social connections among family members; ask families about times and kinds of events that would work best for them
  • Notice children who may be left out and give them special jobs to do with a friendly peer; provide time to openly discuss feelings related to peer group inclusion and exclusion
  • Discuss books about conflict and negotiation, asking children to name the point of conflict, feelings of each protagonist, and effective and ineffective behaviors that each character engaged in
  • Offer “counselor,” a role that helps children resolve conflicts, as a classroom job

Child expresses and manages their feelings and impulses.

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

What educators might observe
  • Demonstrates patience with personal circumstances (e.g., When doing math says, “I need to add slowly when working with big numbers so I don’t make a mistake and get frustrated.”)
  • Identifies their strengths and challenges
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Reflect with families and colleagues about the way strong feelings are expressed in the communities and cultures of the children in your class
  • Encourage the development of children’s self-awareness by suggesting that they write about their personal strengths and challenges
  • Let children know which trusted adults are available to be with them when they have strong feelings

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Understands and follows large concepts or rules regarding safety, kindness, respect, and care within different environments
  • Understands the purpose of laws
  • Follows rules alone or within a group (e.g., quietly enters or exits building, gym, or library alone or in a group)
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Engage children in reflecting on the origins and intentions of social laws
  • Engage children in conversation about social movements to make society more fair
  • Invite children to discuss the difference in rules between various cultures, communities, and families

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Expresses an opinion or point of view on a story, referring to relevant examples or details
  • Summarizes a text in a retelling
  • Uses a wide range of vocabulary specific to academic subjects to explain what they learned in school
  • Uses their knowledge of home language to find cognates in English
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Choose a sentence that has a complex structure
    • Engage in word play by altering the vocabulary in the sentence
    • Chart sentence and unpack meaning
    • Use sentence starters to practice making new sentences with a similar structure
  • Research the bases and parts of words with children; look for and point out meaning in the structure of words

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Listens to peers and attends to conversational turns in a small group
  • Attends during a presentation by a guest speaker who shares about a topic for a sustained period
  • Shows refined understanding of social contexts and uses gestures or nonverbal behavior to respond to situations
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Model strategies for self-monitoring, understanding, and using questions to clarify
  • Ask peers to elaborate or role play the ways in which partners can request more information to increase understanding
  • Structure activities that include speaking with partners and using specific words or parts of speech; for example, interviewing about something in the past that requires understanding of verbs in past tense
  • Use think-aloud or sentence starters to model the thinking process and encourage understanding of one’s own or a character’s feelings, changes, motivations, and inner thoughts

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Takes the perspective of another person in a group into account and modifies their language use or actions as needed
  • Converses on a topic, maintaining attention to what the other person understands and sharing their own understanding
  • Uses language to persuade and argue opinions and to understand and respond to another’s point of view
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Establish norms for social communication in the learning environment
  • Teach children to identify micro-aggressions: brief hostile, negative prejudicial slights and insults toward any group
  • Ask children to write from the perspective of someone from a different time or place
  • Invite children to develop and share a point of view on a topic of interest

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Reads all the books in a series
  • Slows down when the text becomes more difficult to read
  • Makes an argument with relevant details during a book discussion (e.g., uses information learned from watching a National Geographic television program to add to a discussion of a book)
  • Reads a letter from a friend and responds to social questions
  • Identifies an author’s purpose (e.g., “I think the author wanted to teach people not to be afraid to try new things. I’m going to go to try to do the monkey bars.”)
  • Consults other books, maps, websites, hyperlinks, and photographs to enhance their reading
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Give children time to respond to texts in a variety of ways
    • Assign parts to act out a book or story
    • Encourage children to collaborate, improvise, and use props to perform the story
  • Establish centers where children can make art or explore science materials in response to books or stories on a theme or topic

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Asks about rhymes in languages other than their own (e.g., “What rhymes with Estrella?”)
  • Repeats sophisticated tongue twisters, such as “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,”
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Invite children to compose a song for a friend by changing the lyrics of a favorite song to personalize it
  • Play a familiar card game, and replace cards with images and words that match; for example, children can play “Go Fish” and ask for a word that rhymes with the card they have
  • Invite students to create their own rhyming poems, songs, or haikus

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Composes a letter to a friend that uses their home language variation
  • Makes a case in a debate by stating an argument, investigates information, and includes reasons with relevant supporting details in writing
  • Writes a version of a fairy tale with a character using a particular voice
  • Seeks to master mature styles of composition (e.g., draws scenes for a comic book or graphic novel)
  • Uses resources to enhance their compositions (e.g., uses a thesaurus to find a word with a particular nuance to express an emotion or idea)
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Welcome and celebrate the variety of children’s composing processes
  • Discuss what makes an argument effective and how to find an equally effective counterargument
  • Provide models of approaches to composition; discuss and chart an author’s intent or purpose across various types of texts in an author’s body of work (e.g., discuss the purpose of Patricia Polacco’s Chicken Sunday , Thank You, Mr. Falker , and Pink and Say )

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Identifies visual communication that is misleading
  • Takes into consideration the aesthetic aspects of images, audio, and video related to their social and cultural meanings for an intended audience
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Invite a video editor to visit the class and ask them to explain the process of experimenting and editing with different tools to modify size, color, and shape for intended message
  • Provide tools for children to make their own videos
  • Support use of critical media literacy by provocations to discuss credibility and evidence
  • Teach children to identify bias in media

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Start to understand how ecosystems can change quickly (a storm) or slowly (a pond becoming a meadow)
  • Combines and separates mixtures in sophisticated ways (e.g., uses a series of strainers to separate out the pebbles and silt in river water)
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Create opportunities for children to explore stability and change in local contexts
    • Visit a local watershed to study water quality
    • Look at photos of the local area in years past in comparison to today
  • Ask about characters in chapter books (“How do they change over the course of the story? Why do they change? What is the same about them throughout?”)

Child uses symbolic thought to represent.

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

What educators might observe
  • Uses research to add realistic details to their representations (e.g., researches costumes from the past to create a dramatization of the life of a historical figure)
  • Describes systems for symbolic thinking from the past, such as hieroglyphs
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Notice the particular forms of representation that are motivating for different children
  • Encourage children to use art to represent their feelings
  • Invite families to join children in creating
  • Welcome families to celebrate children’s creations
  • Challenge children to create models of villages, replicating complicated architectural details

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Intentionally selects and uses organizational strategies to remember information
  • Uses language to describe chronology, such as “decade” and “century”
  • Uses resources such as books and websites to organize information into a chronological sequence
  • Connects their family history to broad historical events
  • Identifies changes over time in their community
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Use self-talk to describe strategies for organizing information to make it easier to retrieve
  • Ask children to write from perspectives of figures they have read and learned about (What was it like to be a knight’s horse, for example?)
  • Welcome children to link their family histories to larger discussions of historical events

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Compares their observations with observations in books and websites
  • Poses specific questions and then seeks to answer them through research, experiments, and observations (e.g., child wonders how to make a brick and then reads about the topic and mixes various combinations of materials to see which make the best bricks)
  • Identifies and interviews experts to find out the answers to their questions
  • Reviews data recorded in tables over several days to draw conclusions
  • Starts to understand observations as components of systems (e.g., solar system, digestive system) and identifies individual parts and how they work together
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Invite families to share areas of expertise with the class
  • Support children in generating questions for research
  • Provide graphic organizers so that children are able to successfully complete a multiday investigation
  • Create role models for children
    • Visit scientists at work
    • Read about scientists who changed history
    • Ensure representation of women and members of non-dominant racial, linguistic, and cultural groups

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Demonstrates understanding of how humans have affected the environment and how actions and rules are adopted to protect the environment
  • Discussing the purpose of tools (e.g., how windmills produce clean energy)
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Create opportunities for children to see how changing certain factors causes a predictable change in outcome
  • Teach children about climate change and engage the class in analyzing and reducing the group’s use of carbon

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

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

What educators might observe
  • Takes more than one variable into account when solving problems with materials (e.g., considers both weight and distance when setting up a balance)
  • Plans their actions when encountering a difficult problem with materials
  • Systematically builds things and reverses their actions to take things apart
  • Identifies tools and simple machines made to solve problems by people long ago or in a different place, and compares those tools and machines to the ones we use today
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Invite families to visit the classroom and share a tool from their culture, nation of origin, or childhood
  • Provide opportunities for children to learn problem-solving strategies from one another
  • Challenge children to invent objects to solve common classroom or household problems (e.g., a magnetic paper-clip picker-upper)
  • Look for texts that show different ways a problem has been solved throughout history (e.g., irrigation)
G

Math

1. Comparing and Categorizing

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

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary
What educators might observe
  • Creates hierarchical categorizations (e.g., child categorizes plants based on the ecosystems in which they live, then divides the plants that live in the desert into cacti and succulents)
  • Compares their home life to that of children who live in different places and to the lives of children who lived a long time ago
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Invite families to visit the classroom to talk about their childhoods; use Venn diagrams to compare and contrast
  • Read books aloud about children who live in different kinds of families; ask the children questions about how the character’s lives are similar to and different from their own
  • Visit a natural history museum or botanical garden and talk about the categories the curators use

2. Number Sense and Quantity

Child understands and explores numbers and quantity.

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary
What educators might observe
  • Uses groups, multiplication, and place value to visually recognize sets shown briefly (“I saw groups of 10s and twos, so I thought six tens is 60 and four twos is eight, so 68.”)
  • Rounds numbers to the nearest 10 or
  • Builds skills to multiply and divide up to 10 × 10 accurately
  • Solves word (story) problems using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Engage children in a cooking activity that calls for ingredients in ½, ¼, ¾, or ¹∕₃ measures
  • Ask children to write word problems that fit number sentences for their classmates to solve
  • Practice addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division skills using Jeopardy-type games

3. Patterning

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

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary
What educators might observe
  • Skip counts by hundreds, tens, sixes, fives, fours, and twos
  • Is able to detect an error in a number pattern
  • Explains mathematical patterns using the properties of operations
  • Generalizes the properties of multiplication: (a X 1 = a) (a X b = bXa)
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Create AABBA patterns for classmates to complete and/or find the errors
  • Practice looking at an analog clock, describing the number correspondences
  • Give children a sense of time (Time sitting in silence for a minute, then do something repetitive such as snapping fingers or drawing stars for a minute, two minutes, or five minutes.)

4. Spatial Sense and Geometry

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

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary
What educators might observe
  • Uses maps to follow routes, even when they don’t have pictures or the distances are not accurate
  • Mentally moves shapes and says what they need to do to make them fit into a puzzle
  • Names the class of shapes explicitly based on properties, including angle measure
  • Sorts shapes hierarchically, based on properties
Ways educators might support the child's development
  • Create realistic and abstract art using shapes, lines, and understanding of orientation of those things on paper
  • Observe the use of shapes in artwork from different cultures, drawing attention to the cultures of the children in the class
  • Describe the properties of a shape and invite the children to name that shape
  • Place shapes in a category, and ask children to name the reason for the classification

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