Key experiences used in a High-Scope Preschool

This list of key developmental indicators, or key experiences, used in High-Scope preschool
programs. They serve as a set of milestones to guide teacher’s planning and assessment of learning
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, letter-like 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 non-locomotor ways (anchored movement: bending, twisting, rocking, swinging one's arms
♦ Moving in locomotor ways (non-anchored 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

Arts and Sciences

Seriation
♦ Comparing attributes (longer/shorter, bigger/smaller)
♦ Arranging several things one after another in a series or pattern and describing the
relationships(big/bigger/biggest, red/blue/red/blue)
♦ Fitting one ordered set of objects to another through trial and error (small cup—small saucer/
medium cup—medium saucer/big cup—big saucer)

Number
♦ Comparing the numbers of things in two sets to determine "more," "fewer," "same
number"
♦ Arranging two sets of objects in one-to-one correspondence
♦ Counting objects

Space
♦ Filling and emptying
♦ Fitting things together and taking them apart
♦ Changing the shape and arrangement of objects (wrapping, twisting, stretching, stacking,
enclosing)
♦ Observing people, places, and things from different spatial viewpoints
♦ Experiencing and describing positions, directions, and distances in the play space, building,
and neighborhood
♦ Interpreting spatial relations in drawings, pictures, and photographs

Science and Technology

Classification
♦ Recognizing objects by sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell
♦ Exploring and describing similarities, differences, and the attributes of things
♦ Distinguishing and describing shapes
♦ Sorting and matching
♦ Using and describing something in several ways
♦ Holding more than one attribute in mind at a time
♦ Distinguishing between "some" and "all"
♦ Describing characteristics something does not possess or what class it does not belong to

Time
♦ Starting and stopping an action on signal
♦ Experiencing and describing rates of movement
♦ Experiencing and comparing time intervals
♦ Anticipating, remembering, and describing sequences of events

Social Studies
♦ Participating in group routines
♦ Being sensitive to the feelings, interests, and needs of others

Arts

Visual Art
♦ Relating models, pictures, and photographs to real places and things
♦ Making models out of clay, blocks, and other materials
♦ Drawing and painting

Dramatic Art
♦ Imitating actions and sounds
♦ Pretending and role playing

Music
♦ Moving to music
♦ Exploring and identifying sounds
♦ Exploring the singing voice
♦ Developing melody
♦ Singing songs
♦ Playing simple musical instruments


Provided by: Robin Mcconnell