Notice and Recognise

Progress examples to help you notice & recognise a child’s progress.

Use the phases of progress (outlined below) to help you notice and recognise a child’s progress.

Children are attuned and responsive to sounds around them including the pitch, rhythm, tone and repeated sounds in kōrero/ speech, music, waiata, rhymes, and chants.
Children enjoy listening to and interacting with simple stories and picture books. They increasingly connect images in picture books (and related objects) with familiar people, animals, things, actions, and events, and anticipate key elements of familiar stories.
Children are curious about print and print-related practices around them. They explore books and print independently and with others through touch, sight, and sound.
Children are curious about others' writing. They explore mark-making resources and discover their movements can create marks on different surfaces.

Children enjoy participating in rhythm, rhymes and repeated sounds within kōrero/ speech, waiata/ songs, rhymes, and chants with those around them.
Children playfully engage with short stories and books read with others, showing preference for favourites. They connect images and elements of stories with familiar people, places and things and anticipate familiar storylines.
Children actively explore and engage with print and print-related practices in their environment. They increasingly understand how books work, the distinction between print and images, and may recognise familiar print (logos, words, letters).
Children make intentional marks as they explore different mark-making tools and materials and are beginning to understand that marks can represent meanings. They show interest in observing and being involved in others' writing.

Children explore and find joy in the rhythm, rhyme patterns, syllables, and repeated sounds of their languages. They can identify words that repeat sounds or rhyme and explore creating their own.
Children understand that print holds meaning and connect images to the plot in story books. They understand that stories have key characters, follow a logical sequence of events, and can predict what might happen next. They enjoy exploring connections between aspects of stories and previous learning.
Children confidently handle books. They can recognise some letters including the first letter of their name and distinguish between individual words and sentences in text. They can identify a range of familiar words, images and logos in their environment and are developing an understanding of print directionality.
Children show increasing control and purpose with their mark-making as they represent their ideas. They may attribute meaning to individual or strings of marks that resemble elements of written letters and words. Children may recognise and write the first letter of their own name and purposely use mark-making in their play.

Children are increasingly aware of and enjoy word play, including play with word families (e.g., ‘sat’, ‘cat’, ‘hat’). They show awareness of the first sound/s or syllable in familiar words, especially their own name.
Children understand that spoken words can be written down and read by others, and that thoughts (both real and imagined) can be represented in print. They have increasingly sophisticated understandings of story features such as logical sequence, characters, problem and resolution, plot twists and underlying messages. They actively seek connections between stories and their previous learning.
Children understand many concepts about print, such as punctuation, capital/lower case letters, print direction and the roles of title, author, illustrator. They increasingly recognise a range of familiar letters and words in their languages.
Children combine detailed drawings and letter-like marks to convey complex messages and ideas, and show a growing interest in writing words for a purpose. They progress towards writing whole words, such as their own name, with increasing accuracy and confidence. With support, they may write a wider range of words and use invented spelling as they map their knowledge of sounds to letters in print.