As you're taking the time to make all of these really quality observations of the children in your program, you might be thinking, "what does it all mean?" or "how do I make sense of it all?"

It's really helpful to be able to pull back and look at the information you're gathering in relation to the big picture. This is where having a developmental continuum to refer to can be especially helpful. What should a child at this age be able to do? What are the next milestones that are coming up?

The Center for Disease Control has developed a really useful set of resources for looking at child development along a continuum that are available in English and Spanish. What's really useful about this resource is that it's designed for people to be able to use whether or not they have training in child development. This makes it really helpful for sharing with your assistant teachers that might just be getting started on their child development coursework. It also makes it easy to share with parents. There are even checklists you can download for each stage, in case that helps you organize your observations even more!