Remember learning to play the piano or a specific move in gymnastics or dance, or keyboarding, or cooking?

How did you know you were getting better at what you were learning and who helped you see your developing abilities?

It’s important that children, as well as their parents and teachers, have some concrete awareness of their own growth and development. The title of my book Yardsticks was inspired by the yardstick measurements my own parents took of my height and my sister’s height, marked in the doorways of the houses we lived in growing up. I can still remember asking one of my parents to measure me even when I guessed there wouldn’t be much change in the results. Like all children I just liked seeing and being seen.

But what other ways can we help children see themselves as they learn to read, write, learn their math facts, help with household chores, complete their homeworking?

• Report cards mean something to children, standardized state tests not so much until well into secondary school. But completion charts, growth graphs and assignment rubrics for specific academic tasks are ways for children to “see and be seen” on more of a daily or weekly basis.
• A chart of multiplication facts colored in as they are mastered on a chart in a notebook at school and on the refrigerator at home can keep a child on course and parents and teachers on course praising the practice and incremental skill development necessary to master the times tables.
• A graph of pages read in an independent reading book nightly helps students to read more and shows parents and teachers how much reading is being accomplished. “Sarah, I notice there are no marks on your reading graph for the last three days,” tells a student you see her and care about her reading habits.

Incremental success is something children need at all ages and every day, but not always to reward just doing more of something.

Eight-year-olds, for instance, need less homework most nights, smaller numbers of math computation problems in class, clear, attainable goals for helping at home. This is an age where children’s reach exceeds their grasp in quite noticeable ways and it is up to us to accommodate this to increase a sense of success for small accomplishments, thus feeding greater self-awareness and frequent experience with success and healthy, rather than overwhelming doses of falling short of goals.

Do you have a favorite way to provide students or your own children with evidence of their own growth and development?  Click the word “Comment” below to share your thoughts.