HighScope Preschool Key Developmental Indicators

Approaches to Learning

• Making and expressing choices, plans, and decisions
• Solving problems encountered in play

Language, Literacy, and Communication

• Talking with others about personally meaningful experiences
• Describing objects, events, and relations
• Having fun with language: listening to stories and poems, making up stories and rhymes
• Writing in various ways: drawing, scribbling,letterlike forms, invented spelling, conventional forms
• Reading in various ways: reading storybooks,signs and symbols, one's own writing
• Dictating stories

Social and Emotional Development

• Taking care of one's own needs
• Expressing feelings in words
• Building relationships with children and adults
• Creating and experiencing collaborative play
• Dealing with social conflict

Physical Development, Health, and Well-Being

• Moving in nonlocomotor ways (anchored movement: bending, twisting, rocking, swinging one's arms
• Moving in locomotor ways (nonanchored movement: running, jumping, hopping, skipping, marching, climbing)
• Moving with objects
• Expressing creativity in movement
• Describing movement
• Acting upon movement directions
• Feeling and expressing steady beat
• Moving in sequences to a common beat

Arts and Sciences

Mathematics

Seriation

• Comparing attributes (longer/shorter, bigger/smaller)
• Arranging several things one after anotherin a series or pattern and describing the relationships(big/bigger/biggest, red/blue/red/blue)
• Fitting one ordered set of objects to another through trial and error (small cup—small saucer/medium cup—medium saucer/big cup—big saucer)

Number

• Comparing the numbers of things in two sets to determine "more," "fewer," "same number"
• Arranging two sets of objects in one-to-one correspondence
• Counting objects 

Space

• Filling and emptying
• Fitting things together and taking them apart
• Changing the shape and arrangement of objects (wrapping, twisting, stretching, stacking, enclosing)
• Observing people, places, and things from different spatial viewpoints
• Experiencing and describing positions,directions, and distances in the play space, building, and neighborhood
• Interpreting spatial relations in drawings,pictures, and photographs

Science and Technology

Classification

• Recognizing objects by sight, sound,touch, taste, and smell
• Exploring and describing similarities,differences, and the attributes of things
• Distinguishing and describing shapes
• Sorting and matching
• Using and describing something in several ways
• Holding more than one attribute in mind at a time
• Distinguishing between "some"and "all"
• Describing characteristics something does not possess or what class it does not belong to 

Time

• Starting and stopping an action on signal
• Experiencing and describing rates of movement
• Experiencing and comparing time intervals
• Anticipating, remembering, and describing sequences of events

Social Studies

• Participating in group routines
• Being sensitive to the feelings, interests,and needs of others

Visual Arts

• Relating models, pictures, and photographs to real places and things
• Making models out of clay, blocks, and other materials
• Drawing and painting

Dramatic Art

• Imitating actions and sounds
• Pretending and role playing

Music

• Moving to music
• Exploring and identifying sounds
• Exploring the singing voice
• Developing melody
• Singing songs
• Playing simple musical instruments