Written by : Ms. Anjum Ali, Head of Kindergarten, GIIS, Dubai.

During the child’s Kindergarten years,  GIIS offers all parents the opportunity to have a memorable and unique keepsake that celebrates their child’s time with us.

Each child has a ‘Learning Journey Book’; this is an on-going way of recording a child’s achievements and progress. It includes ‘work’ about themselves, art, mini theme work, photographs, videos and observations as evidence and celebrate progress. All areas of learning are covered i.e.: Literacy, Numeracy, Knowing the World, Personal Social Development, Physical Development, Art, Communication and Language.

The objective of this book was to enable teachers to keep a track of a child's development, link it to the areas of learning and depict clearly the teachers’ understanding of her pupils.

This is linked to the Assessment Policy of GIIS and reflects the progress of the child from entry point. It helps the educators to plan activities based on differentiation. It is also based on the learning goals set for the year.

This initiative was started in 2018 – 2019 by the Head of Kindergarten and Senior teachers.

The response from parents was overwhelming; they were happy to have their child’s progress recorded in a ‘memory book’ that they could keep at the end of the year. 

It was a hard copy and had pictures of children performing various tasks at school, co-curricular activities and events along with reading sessions.

Teachers made this book with love, empathy and passion and parents loved it too as it was a keepsake and reference for the child’s future years at school and beyond. 

The highlight of the Learning Journey is that it justifies the assessments done by the teachers.

It clearly reflects the understanding that the teacher has of her child, as ‘every child matters’ as each one is unique. 

In 2020, due to the Covid -19 situation we were constrained to go digital with this unique concept and introduced the digital version of the Learning Journey as guided by the Principal. He believed that this  step would make it user friendly, easy to share with parents.

This was a step in the right direction as it was environment friendly and easily accessible and we will continue with Digital Learning Journey even when things get back to normal.