At Pied Piper Preschool we use an online system called Tapestry for recording your child’s learning and development. The learning journey will be set up when your child starts preschool and you will receive an email prompting you to set up your access to it. Here’s what to expect from Tapestry…
Observations
We mostly record things that we see as being a new achievement for your child. It’s possible you have seen this at home already but we use this to build a record of their learning and development, which helps us make assessments. Some weeks you may receive several and other weeks none. Please remember that staff update learning journeys at home and sometimes it takes a few days for observations to become available for you to see. You can comment on each observation or just give it the thumbs up ‘like’ to show that you have seen it.
Assessments
You should receive an email each time an observation is recorded for your child. Each observation that we record has a list of assessments attached to it; these cover the seven areas of learning from the Early Years Foundation Stage (a learning and development guidance document). This enables us to keep track of your child’s achievements and gives you information about what we see when we observe. Tapestry allows us to track your child’s progress so we can monitor children’s learning and development.
Next steps/reports
Towards the end of each term we will create a ‘report’ and save it onto your child’s learning journey. You should receive an email telling you it has been created. It will list the seven areas of learning for the Early Years Foundation Stage and underneath each area you will see an age bracket that your child’s learning and development is falling into (16-26 months, 22-36 months, 30-50 months, 40-60 months).
Under the appropriate heading will be some ‘next steps’ which we have chosen to focus on for the term. These next steps help to shape our planning and practice. Parents can choose to encourage these next steps at home with some simple activities that helps the child’s development but there is no pressure for this to happen; they are simply things that we will focus on at preschool. Also, please remember – we only see your children for a limited time so it may be that you feel they have already achieved their next steps, or we may even notice they have soon after the report. If this is the case then we’d love to see an observation from home that shows us what your child has achieved. We would be grateful if you could add a comment on each report so we know you have read it; you’ll find a comments box at the bottom of the report.
Contributions from parents
We love seeing observations from home – it’s often a good talking point for your child when they’re at preschool. It also gives us a more rounded view of their learning and development as you obviously know more about your child than we do! Don’t forget, you can use it to take photos of Benjamin bear when he visits or add photos from preschool trips or parties. Again, please don’t feel that you must add them on but we do value your contribution.
Keeping a copy of the learning journey
When your child is due to leave preschool, if they are going to a school that uses Tapestry, we will transfer it to the school with your written permission. The school will continue to add to it and you will be able to download it when they have finished it. If they are going to a school that doesn’t use Tapestry, you will receive an email telling you that you can download a copy of their learning journey, either to your pc or onto a disk. It is only available for a limited time after they have left – we will give you further details about this towards the end of their last term.