A child’s formative years are one of the most important learning periods of their lives. Proper care, guidance, and education are crucial for every child to achieve well-rounded development as they grow. Childcare centers play an important role in helping children through this formative learning process, and it’s vital that early childhood educators have the right learning and assessment tools to maximize each child’s education.
Identifying learning struggles early on can encourage parents and teachers to find the help a child needs in order to improve. But without the right learning and assessment tools, techniques, and response strategies, it’s possible that childcare centers can unintentionally hold back certain aspects of their children’s development.
Fortunately, there are ways to make sure your daycare implements better assessment processes and embraces a comprehensive curriculum that covers every developmental area. Here are some of the ways that improving your assessment tools can better the teaching, operation, and learning at your childcare center.
Visual Learning Data Helps Teachers Improve Curriculum
One of the main benefits of utilizing assessment tools today is that teachers can use the resulting data to their advantage. Having a clear, visual analysis helps teachers and staff to better understand the direction their curriculum should go in order to achieve childcare learning goals.
How do childcare directors track this type of learning data? With digital tools today, assessments can be logged into software that creates a visual scope of progress for your classroom and each individual child. Digital childcare software helps teachers manage this type of developmental progress with:
- Progress and learning framework comparisons
- Pointing out gap areas in your curriculum
- Observation records of each child’s learning
- Adding manual learning updates
- Logging child milestones
- Analysis of which children are behind, and which children are excelling at specific learning frameworks
Want to learn more? Here’s an example of what these assessments look like in Daily Connect:
Learn more: Observations & Assessments on Daily Connect
Learning & Assessment Tools Involve Parents in Their Child’s Progress
It’s one thing for teachers to access the observations they need, but giving parents the ability to view this information can be game changing for the development of each child. When parents send their children to daycare, they don’t often see how day-to-day learning works in action. If all goes well, they see gradual progress. But being able to witness their child’s milestones in real-time can be a huge encouragement, and access to this kind of information can help parents better match up educational activities at home with those at daycare.
Learning and assessment tools allow families to access their child’s reports, assessments, and developmental progress online, whenever they need them. Teachers and staff can also send live updates to parents via direct messages or email. Some childcare software platforms include the option to create online learning portfolios for each student, so that parents and teachers can track their children’s greatest achievements throughout the year.
Proper Assessment Maintains Learning Goals Across Classrooms
One struggle many directors face when it comes to running a childcare center is ensuring that the learning experience is consistent across different classrooms. Many larger childcare centers operate multiple classrooms, or even multiple locations, and it’s not easy to make sure each classroom and location is following the same curriculum to the same high standards. Ensuring this consistency is especially important as children move between classrooms and work with different members of staff.
Ensuring this consistency is less complicated for smaller, at-home daycare centers, but it’s still important that every member of staff has access to learning and assessment tools: not just the owner of the daycare. When all staff involved in teaching the class have access to this information, it’s much easier to track development goals, lesson plans, and ensure a consistently high standard of care and education.
No matter the size of your childcare center, getting a birds-eye view of the progress for every child and every classroom can let you know which areas of your business need the most attention. Many childcare directors use modern childcare technology to ensure these needs are met effectively.
Digital Learning Records Improve Staff Communication
Today, teaching is an engaged, involved, and solution-oriented field respected by families who want the best for their children. Increasing numbers of childcare professionals hold four year degrees in early childhood education, and the quality of learning provided by the childcare industry as a whole has never been higher.
Empowering childcare staff with tools that encourage in-depth communication is a revolutionary act for helping future generations learn. Making classroom learning assessment results available to staff improves communication because:
- It gives directors the opportunity to hear from varying staff perspectives.
- It lets teachers know how they specifically can improve their teaching.
- It maintains a work atmosphere of openness, safety, and trust.
- It helps employees understand their role in working toward common learning goals.
- It lets staff members know which children to offer more educational help to.
- It prevents misunderstandings of yearly and monthly tasks that are necessary.
If your daycare center isn’t using a learning assessment system yet, look for one that enables different staff at your childcare center to communicate seamlessly and have access to information about the learning and development of each individual child. More communication opportunities make for a clearer workflow and ensure that important details never go unnoticed.
Organized Progress Reports Help Align with Childcare Standards
In most parts of the world, your childcare business must meet certain national, state, and local learning standards. These regulations set the standard for learning during formative years. Failing to meet these standards can result in children falling behind, and in some cases, your business getting shut down.
Equipping your daycare with the best assessment tools can align your operations with these requirements. It’s difficult to manually track how well your school is abiding by ever-changing health mandates and learning demands. With full-stack daycare technology, keeping everything in one place is much easier: you’ll be able to automatically create reports, back up important information, and ensure you have all the resources you need to be in compliance with your local childcare standards.
Finding a Learning and Assessment Tool for Your Childcare Center
Is it time to upgrade the learning and assessment tools at your daycare? It’s not a decision to be taken lightly, but it can have a major impact on the success of your childcare business. Learning outcomes significantly affect the overall quality and reputation of your childcare center. When something doesn’t seem to be going the right way, it’s time to turn to new solutions for help.
At Daily Connect, we know how much work goes into running your childcare business every day, and our software is built to help you run every element of your childcare business in a more simple, streamlined manner.
Our suite of learning and assessment tools are designed specifically for childcare centers, and Daily Connect supports more than 50 different learning frameworks from around the world. Our platform provides a range of digital learning and assessment tools, so you can help your daycare and its children thrive more than ever before.
Start with a free trial today, or schedule a demo for a full tour of our learning and assessment features.
