Tracking Child Development with Procare

Use Milestones and State Standards to track child development

What are State Standards?

State Standards are learning and developmental goals for what children should know or be able to do by a specified age. Milestones or learning standards allow centers to track the development of a child in a specific area. Procare offers preloaded state standards for all 50 states and Montessori learning. To ensure the most accurate resources, we have acquired the latest standards on a state by state basis.

Procare has a process in place to track updates to these standards as states release new or revised versions. When updates occur, we will quickly ensure the new set of standards is applied, however, we will only apply them to schools on request to avoid conflicting data.

See: State by State Early Learning Standards and select your state to learn more.

See: Montessori Learning Standards > Early Learning Montessori Standards section for more information.

How to Obtain Your State or Montessori Standards

To have a set of state and/or Montessori standards applied to your school, please contact our Support team. Once Support completes the requested configuration, you will be able to leverage these newly loaded standards in both the mobile app and on the web!

Please be aware that if your center currently uses standards, they will be overridden by the new state standards, which includes the history of assessments containing the progress indicators against specific standards.

Lesson Plans and Milestones

Since most states require the use of learning standards to track developmental milestones, staff should be aware of the skills that children generally demonstrate when they reach a certain age. Once learning standards have been applied to the system, they can be added to lesson plans to ensure each domain is being covered in the classroom.

Milestones within Procare are easily customizable to fit any state or local standard. Use milestone categories to add an additional layer of information with your learning standards, such as age of the child.

How to Complete Assessments/Observation

Activities can be recorded as observations to allow for tracking of specific events that contribute to a child’s development against a standard on the student assesment page.

Once an activity has been recorded, if it has a milestone attached, staff is able to evaluate progress against that specific milestone from the web portal. If an activity was logged without a milestone attached, those activities can still be applied to measure progress under the Learning > Assessments screen. This screen allows staff to use configurable progress indicators to track if a child is improving against specific milestones.