8-year-olds

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

Child pursues their own goals.

Child focuses on tasks and perseveres in accomplishing them.

Child uses their imagination to create and invent.

Child uses and coordinates their large muscle groups.

Child controls the small muscles in their hands and wrists.

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

Child cares for their physical well-being.

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.

Child develops trusting relationships with nurturing adults.

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.

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.

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.

Child navigates friendships with peers through cooperation and negotiation.

Child expresses and manages their feelings and impulses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Child uses symbolic thought to represent.

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

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

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

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