Skip to main content

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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,”

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)

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

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)

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

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

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

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)

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
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

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

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)

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

Search

Find pages, resources, and information across our site.

Recent searches

Found for ""

No results found

Try different keywords or check spelling.

↑↓ Nav Enter Go Esc Exit