4 effective portfolio hacks for preschool teachers

Being an Early Childhood Educator comes with lot of chores. One among them can be creating and managing Portfolios for every child in your class. Do you need some Preschool Portfolio Hacks to make your life easy?

Then you are at a right place. Aliya have trainees working with her across her career of 10 years, and she has seen them all creating portfolios. But not everyone manages to complete them by the end of the year.

An educator has multiple tasks. Aliya strongly recommends to include Portfolios as one of your daily tasks. Here Aliya has listed 4 Preschool Portfolio Hacks just for you:

Begin before first day of school:

I always encourage educators to prepare the customised portfolio folders for children right before the school year begins. This hack shall help you customise the portfolios more efficiently. This is because you shall have enough time to put in your thoughts and creativity.  Though the portfolios can be child customised, the content themes inside the portfolio should carry same pattern. For instance, I design a different cover and back for each of my children’s portfolio. But the sequence of the activities remain the same for everyone. I put in everything related to motor development, then language, math, art and creativity, cognitive development and social emotional development. I maintain all the anecdotal records in the same format in all the portfolios.

Involve children:

You can introduce the portfolios to your children on the very first day of school and show them how easily they are accessible to them. Always let your children engage with their portfolios, at least once in a week.  You can also help them reflect to understand what led them create or do any particular activity from their portfolio. Ask them open ended questions so that they can assess their own work in more reasonable way. Review the progress with them and appreciate their growth and development. You can also teach them how to maintain their own portfolios independently. This will ease your work and you just have to supervise each of them and scaffold if required.

Housing portfolios:

There are many educators who prefer to send out the portfolios with children and request parents to store it at home. I strongly recommend to house the portfolios right in your classroom. This will help you to maintain them properly and children will be involved in the reflection process every time.  You can have one drawer or one bin per child to house their portfolios.

Organising the portfolio content:

Using colour codes for every developmental area always helps me to make the portfolios look lively and organised. Another way to store anecdotes can be using the backside of the photographs. For example, if you have captured a gross motor activity of a particular child, you can write your observations right behind that picture for more appropriate understanding. To organise the content in best way, you should arrange all your documentation in alphabet order to avoid confusion or gaps if any.

I hope, these hacks help you to manage and create beautiful portfolios for your class in the new academic year.

Enjoy your work and happy reading!!!