For Teachers

Simple Assessment Strategies for Early Childhood Classrooms

On a stack of checklists that told me almost nothing, and the one page that told me everything.

The paperwork that never seemed to match the child

In my first few months working as an educator, fresh off a PhD and partway through a Diploma in Early Childhood Education, I was handed the same thing at every new centre, a checklist. Can identify primary colours, yes or no. Can count to ten, yes or no. Can hold scissors correctly, yes or no. Tidy boxes, one tick at a time.

I filled them in dutifully, the way you do when you’re new and want to be seen doing the job properly. But I kept having the same nagging feeling, ticking a box for a three-year-old who could count to ten on a good day but not on a tired one told me almost nothing useful about her as a learner. It captured a single moment, stripped of context, and called it an accurate picture of a whole child.

My academic instincts, if I’m honest, initially pulled me toward trusting the checklist more than my own observation. A checklist looked rigorous. It produced something that resembled data. My own written impressions of a child felt, by comparison, soft and unscientific, the kind of thing a proper researcher would be embarrassed to submit as evidence of anything.

Where the actual shift came from

The change happened at one particular centre, watching a more experienced educator document a child’s morning entirely differently to how I’d been trained to. Rather than a checklist, she wrote a short, plain paragraph describing exactly what she’d seen, a child building a tower, adjusting it twice after it fell, narrating his own thinking out loud as he worked out why the third attempt held and the first two hadn’t. She’d taken a photo alongside it. That was the whole assessment for that session.

Reading the second version, I understood immediately what the checklist had been missing. It wasn’t just more detail for the sake of it. It captured problem-solving, persistence, language development, and genuine delight, all in one small paragraph, none of which a tick box had any way of holding. The checklist told me what a child could do in isolation. The narrative told me who he actually was as a learner that morning.

There was a second thing I noticed that morning too, watching how that educator handled the handover to the child’s family at pickup. She didn’t recite a percentage or a list of ticked skills. She read the family the “boss block” line, and the parent’s face changed completely, from the polite, slightly glazed expression parents often wear at pickup, into genuine delight and connection with what their child had actually spent the morning doing. A checklist has never once produced that reaction in a parent, in my experience. A specific, well-observed sentence does it almost every time.

Why it took a while to actually trust this shift

Knowing the narrative approach was better didn’t make it simple to adopt consistently, and the obstacles here were genuinely practical, not just a matter of changing my mind.

Time was the first and most persistent one. A checklist takes seconds to tick. A genuine, specific narrative observation takes real attention and several minutes to write well, and across a room of twenty or more children, that arithmetic doesn’t easily work, particularly for a casual or relief educator moving between centres who didn’t have the luxury of building deep, ongoing familiarity with any one group of children over time.

There was resistance from some centre directors too, and it wasn’t unreasonable resistance. Checklists produce something that looks tidy and comparable for compliance purposes, easy to file, easy to show a regulator or a parent expecting a clear yes or no answer. A folder of narrative observations, however richer, is a harder thing to standardise across a whole centre, and I understood why some directors were reluctant to move away from something that at least looked consistent on paper.

The most useful thing I found in navigating that resistance was framing narrative observation as a complement rather than a replacement, at least at first. Most centres already required some form of formal documentation for regulatory purposes, and I learned not to fight that requirement directly. Instead, I’d do the required checklist quickly, then spend the time I’d genuinely have spent agonising over its accuracy on a short narrative note instead, offered as an addition rather than a rebellion. Several directors who were initially sceptical came around once they saw the difference in how families actually responded to the narrative notes at pickup.

My own writing needed real practice too, more than I expected. My early attempts at narrative observation were embarrassingly close to just describing what happened without any actual insight, closer to a diary entry than a meaningful piece of assessment. It took watching several more experienced educators, and a fair amount of rewriting my own notes after the fact, before I could reliably notice and write down the moment that actually mattered inside an otherwise ordinary five minutes of play.

There was a subtler trap too, one I fell into more than once early on. A narrative observation can slide into projection if you’re not careful, writing what you assume a child was thinking rather than what you actually observed them doing and saying. I had to learn to stick closely to what I could genuinely see and hear, and treat any interpretation beyond that as a guess clearly labelled as a guess, not a fact dressed up as one.

Moving between so many different centres and rooms added its own complication too. Just as I’d start to build the specific, detailed knowledge of a child that makes a genuinely insightful narrative observation possible, a placement would end and I’d move on to an entirely new room of children I knew almost nothing about yet. Educators who stay with the same group for a full year clearly have an advantage here that a moving, casual educator like I was during those two years simply didn’t have, and I had to be honest with myself about the limits of what I could observe meaningfully in a short placement.

What actually worked, once it clicked

A short, simple structure ended up doing most of the work, once I stopped overcomplicating it. Describe specifically what the child did, in plain language, no jargon. Note anything they said, word for word where possible. Add one line connecting it to a broader area of development, without turning the whole thing into an essay. A photo, where appropriate, does a huge amount of the storytelling on its own.

None of that takes vastly longer than a checklist once you’ve had genuine practice at it, and it produces something a family can actually read and feel moved by, in a way a page of ticked boxes never quite manages.

The second version, again, isn’t just longer for the sake of it. It captures cause and effect reasoning, independent problem-solving, and persistence, alongside the language milestone the checklist was technically checking for. One paragraph doing the work of what would otherwise need several separate boxes to even attempt.

How to tell whether an observation is actually useful

A few things I learned to check my own notes against, before deciding whether an observation was worth keeping in a child’s file. Could a parent who wasn’t there picture the actual moment from what I’d written, or would it read as generic enough to describe almost any child on almost any day? Did it capture something specific to that child’s own thinking or interest, rather than simply confirming a milestone the curriculum expected them to reach eventually anyway? And did it avoid quietly turning into a judgement, framing a child in terms of what they couldn’t yet do rather than what they were actually doing in that moment.

Observations that failed those checks usually needed a rewrite, not because they were dishonest, but because they hadn’t actually captured anything a checklist couldn’t have captured just as well in a fraction of the time.

Where this idea comes from

What that more experienced educator was doing, without necessarily naming it that way, sits inside a well-established approach called Learning Stories, developed by Margaret Carr in New Zealand to support that country’s Te Whāriki early childhood curriculum. Learning Stories are structured narrative observations built specifically to highlight a child’s strengths, interests, and dispositions, rather than measuring them against a fixed checklist of deficits waiting to be filled in.

Famly’s overview of Te Whāriki and Learning Stories explains the underlying philosophy well, including why Carr specifically moved away from pre-set milestone checklists toward placing the learner, and their own emerging identity as a learner, at the centre of the process.

Carr’s own framing of this is worth sitting with directly. Prior to Learning Stories becoming standard practice, much of early childhood assessment in the region relied on exactly the kind of deficit-focused checklist I’d been handed on day one, identifying gaps in a child’s knowledge so that teaching could then target those gaps. Carr and her collaborators argued this framing quietly shaped how educators saw children overall, as a collection of missing skills waiting to be filled in, rather than as capable people already doing genuine cognitive work, moment to moment, that simply looked different from a checklist’s narrow expectations.

This isn’t a purely New Zealand idea sitting outside Australian practice either. Australia’s own national Early Years Learning Framework, Belonging, Being and Becoming, explicitly encourages educators to collect what it calls rich and meaningful information that depicts children’s learning in context, rather than isolated, decontextualised measurements. It’s the actual regulatory framework most Australian early childhood settings, including every centre I worked at, operate under.

The full Early Years Learning Framework document is available through ACECQA here, and it’s worth knowing that the shift I stumbled onto in one centre isn’t a personal preference sitting outside official practice, it’s actually closer to what the framework itself is asking for than the checklist habit I’d been handed on my first day.

It’s genuinely striking, looking back, that a framework and a formal assessment methodology developed independently in two neighbouring countries converged on almost the same conclusion, that meaningful assessment in early childhood needs to describe a whole, capable child in context, not measure isolated skills against a fixed external standard. That convergence is a stronger argument than either source alone would be.

Where this connects to the worksheets

This period shaped one very specific feature of our tracing bundle, the progress tracker included as one of the bonus pages. I built it deliberately as a simple record rather than a checklist of pass or fail milestones, space for a parent or educator to note what a child actually did on a particular page, a phrase they used, a letter that suddenly clicked, rather than just a tick confirming a skill was present or absent.

If you want to see it alongside the rest of what’s in the tracing bundle, it’s included as one of the five bonus pages in the full set.

If you’re doing this at home rather than in a centre

Everything above was learned inside a classroom, but the same instinct works just as well for a parent tracking a child’s progress at home, and arguably matters more there, since a home version doesn’t need to satisfy any regulator at all, only genuinely help the family notice and remember.

The same short structure applies. What did your child actually do today, in their own words if they said something worth keeping. Skip the urge to compare against a printed milestone chart for their age, and write down what actually happened instead. A shoebox of these small notes, collected over a year, ends up being a far more honest and moving record of a child’s early learning than any completed checklist ever could.

What I’d tell myself with that first stack of checklists

I don’t fill in centre checklists any more, but I still catch myself, even now, reaching for the tidier, more measurable version of things before trusting a plainer, more honest observation. Old academic habits don’t fully disappear just because you’ve seen good evidence against them, they just get quieter and easier to notice when they show up.

Looking back across those two years, the shift from checklist to narrative wasn’t really about assessment methodology at all, in the end. It was about what I actually believed a young child was, a bundle of measurable, isolated skills waiting to be ticked off, or a whole, thinking, capable person whose learning only makes sense in the context of what they were actually doing and saying at the time. Once I’d genuinely seen the difference those two beliefs produced, in a parent’s face at pickup, in what I actually remembered about a child months later, going back to the tidier, emptier version was never really an option again.

If I could go back to that first centre with my clipboard full of tick boxes, I’d tell myself this: the box was never going to tell you who that child actually was. Write down what you actually saw instead. It’ll take longer, and it’ll be worth every extra minute.