PreK Skills Checklists

In my classroom, I am lucky enough to have an aide throughout the day! 

One thing that I decided to do this year is to use my aide as a second pair of eyes when observing student skills. When deciding to do so, I couldn't figure out how exactly I should make sure my aide was aware of my expectations. This is when I decided that checklists, not just for her to use, but for myself to use throughout the day, would work wonders! I don't know how many times I have thought to myself in my morning class, "Oh, Justin is doing such an awesome job with his letter recognition today!" only to later forget to make note of it in my Student Data Binder. 

I plan on updating my Student Data Binder this year!

With this having been both of our first years in the classroom, their were many things that did not go as well as I would have hoped. I was unaware of ways to use my aide around the classroom (because let's be honest, there was no college course on working with paraprofessionals.) My aide herself had never been in a classroom before, went 6 weeks with the first teacher and finished out the semester with a long term sub before I was placed in the classroom. 

One of the main problem areas I noticed was our communication regarding students and their progress. This year I hope to change change this into one of our best assets as a student support system, so I designed checklists that will work best with the way that my classroom is set up and the activities that we will do.

I have made myself a total of 10 different checklists:

Class Participation MWF

Class Participation TR

Cutting Skills

Coloring Skills

Art Skills (based on our first 4 art projects)

Social/Emotional Development (to be used during free choice centers)

Miscellaneous Skills (goes with activities planned)

Math Skills

Oral Language Development

Emergent Reading/Writing Skills

I have yet to decide how to do class participation yet. I'm thinking that this will be observed during our circle time daily. I have made two different checklists for participation: My aide will use the Monday, Wednesday, Friday checklist to observe those days and I will observe for participation on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

 If you are interested in my checklists, please feel free to comment with your email address and I will send you the file!