School Readiness Goals Revised 2023

LCCAA Head Start

School

Readiness Goals

Birth through Kindergarten Entry Learning & Development

Dear Parents/Guardians,

The Office of Head Start (OHS) defines school readiness as children possessing the skills, knowledge, and attitudes necessary for success in school and for later learning in life. School readiness means that your child is ready for school, your family is ready to support your child’s learning, and schools are ready for your child to transition to their new learning environment.

As a Head Start grantee, we are required to have school readiness goals and is responsible for measuring child outcomes to ensure children’s development and learning progresses throughout the school year. These goals are supportive of dual language learners and children with a disability. Child outcome data is gathered in November, February and May and your child’s individual growth is shared with you in a report card during conferences and home-visits. During these meetings, teachers will be creating educational and developmental goals individualized to your child’s needs to prepare for school readiness. These resources were utilized in the development of the school readiness goals:

 Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework (ELOF)

 Head Start Health & Nutrition Performance Standards

 Ohio’s Early Learning & Development Standards (ELDS)

 Ohio’s Early Learning Assessment (ELA)

 Creative Curriculum’s GOLD Assessment Learning Objectives

 Ohio's Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA)

 Input from Head Start staff, parents and the early childhood community.

In this document, you will see skills, knowledge and attitudes for infants, toddlers and preschoolers, which illustrate a progression of development and learning over the following domains:

 Social & Emotional Development

 Physical Development & Wellness

 Language & Literacy

 Approaches Towards Learning

 Cognitive Development

 Mathematics

 Science

 Social Studies

 Creative Development

Parents/guardians can support their child’s development and learning by working on these goals. You are your child’s first teacher. These goals will be supported throughout your child’s Head Start experience by our researched-based curriculum, developmentally appropriate activities, exploration in their learning environment, and through interactions with their peers and teachers.

We thank you for choosing Head Start as your child’s first early childhood learning experience.

Ready for Kindergarten!

Social & Emotional Development

Children will develop strong positive relationships with others.

Infant: Increases eye contact with adults and others and points to or reaches for familiar adults.

Toddler: Manages separation with familiar adults; plays near other children and shows pleasure when seeing a friend.

Preschool: Begins to engage in cooperative play and seeks out familiar adults.

Children will develop and strengthen skills to manage all emotions.

Infant: Seeks comfort from familiar adults and others.

Toddler: Begins to self-soothe alone or with support (e.g. blanket, stuffed animals, or adults).

Preschool: Utilizes a variety of coping skills to manage emotions alone or with support (e.g. breathing, fidgets, using words, etc.). Children will be able to ask for help when needed.

Physical Development & Wellness

Children will demonstrate fine motor, balance and coordination skills.

Infant: Demonstrates strength and control of head, arms, legs and trunk. Reaches, touches and holds objects purposefully.

Toddler: Moves with increasing coordination and balance and experiments with different ways of moving the body. Coordinates the use of arms, hands and fingers to accomplish tasks.

Preschool: Maintains controlled muscle movement and balance during active play. Coordinates the use of hands, fingers and wrists to manipulate objects and perform tasks.

As part of daily routines, children will develop knowledge and skills on self-care, safety and healthy habits with increasing independence.

Infant: Demonstrates emerging participation in self-care tasks like dressing, teeth brushing, safety practices and washing hands. Interacts with adults in active physical play using simple movements, stands alone and uses mouth to explore objects.

Toddler: Participates in self-care tasks and healthy habits with adult assistance by communicating their hunger or thirst needs. Begins participating in structured and unstructured physical activities and following limits and expectations. Able to chew, sip, and swallow small bites.

Preschool: Independently completes self-care tasks (e.g. brushing teeth, washing hands, getting dressed). Recognizes that healthy food choices and physical activity helps the body grow. Begins following simple rules and solving problems. Able to crunch, bite and swallow table food.

Language & Literacy

Children will use language to express their wants and needs, engage in conversation and follow directions.

Infant: Uses sounds and gestures in different ways to express wants, needs and feelings.

Toddler: Combines 2 to 3 words to communicate needs and wants (e.g. “more milk”).

Preschool: Initiates and engages in back and forth conversations. Increases number of words in their vocabulary.

Children will recognize that print has meaning.

Infant: Shows interest in books, pictures, songs and rhymes.

Toddler: Shows an appreciation for books, songs, and rhymes and actively participates by demonstrating choice.

Preschool: Recognizes and retells familiar books. Orients books properly and describes their features (e.g. front, back, spine, etc.). Begins to recognize and identify letters and simple words (e.g. like their name).

Children will use writing to convey a message.

Infant: Makes marks on paper with a large crayon or marker.

Toddler: Makes scribbles on paper to represent an object or convey a message.

Preschool: Uses drawing, controlled scribbles and mocks actual letters to convey a message.

Children will demonstrate awareness that spoken language is composed of smaller segments of sounds.

Infant: Coos, babbles and experiments with vocal sounds.

Toddler: Explores sounds with objects and distinguishes between sounds that are the same and different (e.g. environmental sounds, animal sounds, etc.).

Preschool: With modeling and support, recognizes and produces rhyming words (e.g. cat/hat), hears and shows awareness of separate syllables in words (e.g. clap out pen and cil to make pencil) and can add and separate the sounds that make up a word.

Children will identify letters of the alphabet and produce correct sounds associated with letters.

Infant: Not applicable for this age.

Toddler: Begins to have awareness of letters, such as singing the ABC song and observing letters within the environment especially in their own name.

Preschool: Recognizes and names at least half of the letters of the alphabet. Begins to tell the difference between capital and lowercase letters and some of the sounds associated with them.

Approaches Towards Learning

Children will show curiosity in new experiences and activities.

Infant: Uses senses and expressions to attend to surroundings.

Toddler: Initiates new skills and repeats to gain confidence.

Preschool: Gains independence in exploring new experiences. Children will maintain interest and demonstrate persistence in completing tasks.

Infant: Maintains brief engagement with familiar people and objects.

Toddler: Maintains focus through interruptions.

Preschool: Carries out tasks, activities or projects from beginning to end despite frustrations or challenges.

Children will develop a growth mindset by believing that their brain can grow and learn new things.

Infant: Explores unfamiliar objects.

Toddler: Demonstrates awareness of own abilities.

Preschool: Recognizes connection between effort and accomplishments of goals.

Cognitive Development

Develops the ability to recall information about people, objects and past experiences.

Infant: Recognizes familiar adults.

Toddler: Recognizes and recalls familiar routines.

Preschool: Recreates or retells activities or routines based on past experiences.

Demonstrates increasing ability to think symbolically.

Infant: Explores objects by mouth, shaking or dropping and looks for objects removed from sight (e.g. hide and seek of an object).

Toddler: Uses objects for intended purpose and begins to use objects to represent something else (e.g. uses a block as a phone).

Preschool: Engages in pretend play and begins to identify symbols and their meaning (e.g. recycle symbol, stop sign).

Uses increasing complex strategies to solve problems.

Infant: Actively uses the body to explore their environment to obtain a goal (e.g. reaches for a toy across the room and moves toward it).

Toddler: Uses simple strategies to solve problems (e.g. engages in hide and seek).

Preschool: Tries different strategies to solve a problem (e.g. questioning, planning, trial & error).

Develops the ability to be flexible in thinking and behavior.

Infant: Repeats an action to cause a known reaction.

Toddler: Demonstrates awareness of situational rules (e.g. holding hands to cross the street).

Preschool: Adapts behaviors as needed (e.g. transitions, daily routines, unexpected events, etc.).

Explores and investigates objects in the environment.

Infant: Explores objects using senses and simple actions (e.g. putting things in their mouth).

Toddler: Intentionally manipulates objects to discover how they work.

Preschool: Engages in more complex investigations including asking questions, comparing and predicting.

Develops understanding of cause & effect.

Infant: Repeats simple actions to make things happen. (e.g. dropping a toy for an adult to pick up).

Toddler: Intentionally uses objects for known reaction (e.g. busy box).

Preschool: Predicts, infers and explains outcomes based on prior knowledge or experiences.

Mathematics

Child demonstrates awareness that numbers have value and represent quantity.

Infant: Reaches for one or more objects and uses beginning words like “more” and “all gone.”

Toddler: Identifies awareness of concepts of quantities like 1, 2, or more.

Preschool: Recites the counting sequence to 10 by ones accurately and beyond 10 with some errors.

Represents a quantity in different ways.

Infant: Notices change in quantity of objects (e.g. hide an object under a blanket).

Toddler: Uses words or actions to show understanding of concepts of more, all or none.

Preschool: Uses comparison words such as more, less, some or equal.

Children will compare objects by attributes (e.g. size, length, weight, etc.)

Infant: Explores a variety of objects.

Toddler: Identifies objects by attributes (e.g. small, big, heavy, color).

Preschool: Sorts objects by one or more attributes.

Children will explore special relationships and describe shapes in their environment.

Infant: Examines and watches objects as they move.

Toddler: Demonstrates how things fit together and/or move in space with increasing accuracy.

Preschool: Uses positional words (e.g. in, over, under) and identifies basic shapes.

Social Studies

Children will develop awareness of own culture and other people.

Infant: Develops awareness of self and other people.

Toddler: Develops preference for familiar adults and routines.

Preschool: Understands own family and other people’s routines and traditions.

Develops basic understanding of needs & wants.

Infant: Communicates needs (e.g. cries, reaches out when tired, hungry, etc.).

Toddler: Seeks help and begins to meet own needs (e.g. gets cup for a drink, get tissue when needed).

Preschool: Shows awareness that others have wants and needs (e.g. if friends crying, give them a hug). Able to make choices to satisfy their wants when resources are limited.

Develops understanding that everyone has rights and responsibilities within a group.

Infant: Shows awareness of familiar people and objects around them while responding to change in voice and nonverbal cues.

Toddler: Participates in simple routines, responds to guidance and follows simple rules (e.g. bedtime routine, cooperates when redirected, uses slide correctly).

Preschool: Identifies and uses simple rules at home and school (e.g. using slide correctly, shows responsibility and performs simple chores like putting clothes away).

Develops ability to take care of materials in their environment.

Infant: Interacts with objects in their environment.

Toddler: Returns materials to correct location in their environment.

Preschool: Cares for environment while using and caring for materials (e.g. helps sweep or puts toys away in containers or on a shelf).

Creative Development

Express ideas and feelings through the visual arts.

Infant: Explores a variety of visual art materials (e.g. music, textures, dance, etc.).

Toddler: Uses self-selected materials and activities to express ideas and feelings.

Preschool: Explores materials to create open-ended, free style art.

Children will use creativity and imagination to manipulate materials and assume roles in dramatic play situations.

Infant: Make discoveries of self, others and the environment around them.

Toddler: Uses materials in new and unconventional ways.

Preschool: Engages in inventive social play by using imagination and creativity to interact with objects and materials.