- It's a great question. If you're not familiar with the kindergarten curriculum, it is play-based. And sometimes that play-based inquiry style of learning might make a new teacher feel overwhelmed. One thing that I personally love about the kindergarten classroom is that you get to work with an early childhood educator. Working as a team is great because that means there's two adults in the classroom. More opportunities for observation. One thing that my teaching partner and I have done in the past while teaching in person is walking around the classroom with a clipboard. On our clipboard, we have students names organized into little charts. You can take anecdotal notes, such as just a comment on the student's learning. You can also have a checklist of the different types of learning behaviors that you're looking for. And you can check off the learning that you are witnessing while walking around the classroom. Another thing that my teaching partner and I like to use in the classroom is taking photos. Taking photos of students' work is great especially in kindergarten because in the kindergarten curriculum we don't use worksheets. So you might not have have something that the child is able to save. So it might be something that the child created using blocks. Taking a photo is a great keepsake to remember the type of learning that took place that day. The photo can be shared with the parents through a Google classroom, for example, or it can be saved in a student's portfolio. With parents' permission. Another strategy that my teaching partner and I like to use is video recording. Video recording in the kindergarten classroom is great as there's so many different conversations that are happening and it might be challenging for an educator to take note of all of these conversations. One thing that my teaching partner and I have started to use in our classroom is an app called Google Keep. You can use this app on a tablet or an iPad. This app is great because you can take a photo of the student's learning and simply put in hashtags of the different frames of the curriculum that the child is meeting. You can also save the photo under the, the child's name. This is something that we have recently discovered and really enjoy using in our classroom because when it comes to reporting on the students' learning during report card season, the Google keep is there and it has everything saved and organized and you're able to look back and talk about the learning that took place that day. One thing that I suggest to new teachers is to become familiar with the growing success document. In recent years they have created a growing success document specifically for the kindergarten classroom. In that document, it'll give you great suggestions on how you can document learning in your classroom.