Recently Karen contributed her expertise in childcare to an Early Childhood Education textbook. She wrote two pages on Journey and Floor Books! The pages she authored feature images taken from the Discovery Childcare Centres. The following is quoted material written by Karen for the ECE textbook
Journey Books
At Discovery Child Care Centre, our teachers use journey books as one form of ongoing documentation of a child’s learning. A journey book is a child’s evolving life story of ideas, investigations, and learning while at the centre. The journey book follows the child from room to room (ie., infant to toddler to preschool)
The purpose of the journey book is to provide communication to families about child’s day while at the child-care facility, to create an ongoing collection and samples of the child’s work that demonstrate the learning process and the developmental progress that the child is making, and to showcase each child’s uniqueness.
The Teachers include these things:
- Written and photographic documentation that shows the child’s emerging and mastered skills in all developmental domains: physical, social-emotional, cognitive, language and literacy, and creative expression
- Samples of artwork
- Learning stories
- Words and sentences (ideas and thoughts) that the child uses to explain or elaborate what he or she is doing
- Child’s writing samples (including attempts at writing)
The textbook is titled “Take a Look – Observation and Portfolio Assessment in Early Childhood” Find more information about this textbook on Amazon