Evidencing the planning cycle with the push of a button

Okay, let’s admit it, many of us have been there… We get our notice of Rating and Assessment, and the sweat starts to build as we look for evidence of planning cycles for the children in our care.  We know that we have been basing what we do on our intimate knowledge of children’s interests, learning, development and family input, but for some reason, evidencing the planning cycle can seem quite daunting. We know it’s there; why isn’t it jumping off the page?

The good news for users of EarlyWorks, is that with the click of a couple of buttons, you can have that planning cycle jumping off the screen right into a report!

There are two easy ways of evidencing the planning cycle for individual children:

  1. The ‘Generate Planning Cycle Report’ function
  2. The Child Summary

Generate Planning Cycle Report

This report is generated dynamically, giving the educator the ability to trace any given path within a cycle, no matter how complex.  This provides a great diagnostic tool for room leaders wanting to ensure their educators are creating visible planning cycles within their documentation. 

The feature can also be used during the rating and assessment process to provide planning cycle evidence and assist educators to confidently talk through any number of planning cycles for any number of Children in any Room.

The feature is available via the Admin > Generate Planning Cycle Report menu option.

To generate the report, administrators and educators enter selection criteria based on either a Child or Room cycle.

Once a Starting Observation has been selected the planning cycle will start to display. Use the Next Experience and Observation dropdown lists within the steps generated to continue generation of the report based on a selected path within the cycle.

You can print the generated cycle as a Word document at any time using the Print the steps displayed button.

Child Planning Cycle Example

 

The Child Summary

To see the planning cycle for an individual child: Go to the Child Summary for that child (Children>Child Summary). Go to Recent Observations and click on the More button. Here you will find details of all Observations that have been created for the child.

The Experience Observed column provides a link to the planned experience that the child was engaged in when the observation was created, while the Next Experience provides details of any experiences that were planned as a follow up to this observation.  And if an Observation has been created of that Next Experience, there will be a link to it in the Evaluation section.

Child Planning Cycle Sample

By clearly showing what experience was being observed as well as what experiences were planned as a result of the observation, educators can easily track the planning cycle for the child. So rather than having to search through pages of documentation, the cycle is there on one screen.

Recent Posts
Critical reflection in childcareHoliday Programs