HighScope Preschool Key Developmental Indicators

High/Scope's "key developmental indicators" (KDIs) are early childhood milestones that guide teachers as they plan and assess learning experiences and interact with children to support learning. The term "key developmental indicators" replaces the term "key experiences." The 58 KDIs match the 58 preschool key experiences, but they have been reorganized under the following five curriculum content areas: approaches to learning; language, literacy, and communication; social and emotional development; physical development, health, and well-being; and arts and sciences. Arts and sciences are further divided into these subjects: mathematics, science and technology, social studies, and the arts. These content areas, based on the school readiness dimensions of the National Educational Goals Panel, align readily with national and state early learning standards.

To learn more about the reorganization of High/Scope's preschool content areas, you can link to a chart that shows the alignment of the High/Scope key developmental indicators and key experiences.

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