So many children! So many planning cycles! Help!

A key difference between the long day care context and the school context is attendance.  Where schools generally have the same children attending the same class every day, educators in long day care services may have some children attending most days of the week, while others may only attend one day per week, and others may attend on a casual basis.  This variety of attendance patterns can make keeping track of documentation for every child incredibly challenging.

In order to meet the requirements of Quality Area 1, educators need to ensure ‘Each child’s learning and development is assessed or evaluated as part of an ongoing cycle of observation, analysing learning, documentation, planning, implementation and reflection’ (1.3.1). So regardless of how regularly children attend our service, we need to have a planning cycle in place.

If only there was a simple way to keep track of every child in every room of our service…  The good news is there is a way😊 EarlyWorks’ Child Alerts function keeps track of ALL documentation for EVERY child in EVERY room.

On one screen, educators can see at a glance the date of the last outcome comment, individual observation, group observation, experience and journal entry created for every child.  Educators can even set a timeframe in which they want each child to have some documentation created, and when it gets close to that timeframe a minor alert comes up (the date appears in orange) and when the timeframe is met or exceeded, a major alert comes up (the date appears in red).

So by using EarlyWorks’ Child Alerts, educators can show that they are regularly documenting the learning and development of every child in their care. It’s all there on one screen.