Child recognizes and develops the ability to explain how material objects change and how they remain stable.
What educators might observe
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Start to understand how ecosystems can change quickly (a storm) or slowly (a pond becoming a meadow)
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Combines and separates mixtures in sophisticated ways (e.g., uses a series of strainers to separate out the pebbles and silt in river water)
Child uses symbolic thought to represent.
What educators might observe
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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)
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Describes systems for symbolic thinking from the past, such as hieroglyphs
Child develops the ability to store, retrieve, and share information about past experiences.
What educators might observe
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Intentionally selects and uses organizational strategies to remember information
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Uses language to describe chronology, such as “decade” and “century”
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Uses resources such as books and websites to organize information into a chronological sequence
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Connects their family history to broad historical events
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Identifies changes over time in their community
Child becomes a scientific thinker by manipulating objects, asking questions, making observations and predictions, and developing generalizations.
What educators might observe
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Compares their observations with observations in books and websites
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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)
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Identifies and interviews experts to find out the answers to their questions
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Reviews data recorded in tables over several days to draw conclusions
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Starts to understand observations as components of systems (e.g., solar system, digestive system) and identifies individual parts and how they work together
Child understands and explores the causes and effects of actions and events.
What educators might observe
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Demonstrates understanding of how humans have affected the environment and how actions and rules are adopted to protect the environment
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Discussing the purpose of tools (e.g., how windmills produce clean energy)
Child plans and uses hands, tools, and technology to solve problems with materials.
What educators might observe
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Takes more than one variable into account when solving problems with materials (e.g., considers both weight and distance when setting up a balance)
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Plans their actions when encountering a difficult problem with materials
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Systematically builds things and reverses their actions to take things apart
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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
Child recognizes some similarities and differences between familiar and unfamiliar people, objects, or experiences.
What educators might observe
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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)
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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
Child understands and explores numbers and quantity.
What educators might observe
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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.”)
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Rounds numbers to the nearest 10 or
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Builds skills to multiply and divide up to 10 × 10 accurately
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Solves word (story) problems using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division
Child develops the ability to identify, describe, extend, and create patterns.
What educators might observe
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Skip counts by hundreds, tens, sixes, fives, fours, and twos
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Is able to detect an error in a number pattern
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Explains mathematical patterns using the properties of operations
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Generalizes the properties of multiplication: (a X 1 = a) (a X b = bXa)
Child understands how objects, points, lines, and shapes fit in space.
What educators might observe
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Uses maps to follow routes, even when they don’t have pictures or the distances are not accurate
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Mentally moves shapes and says what they need to do to make them fit into a puzzle
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Names the class of shapes explicitly based on properties, including angle measure
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Sorts shapes hierarchically, based on properties
