HighScope Key Experiences for Preschool Children​

The HighScope preschool key experiences provide a composite picture of early childhood development, are fundamental to young children's construction of knowledge, take place repeatedly over an extended period of time, and describe the concepts and relationships of young children are striving to understand. They occur in active learning settings in which children have opportunities to make choices and decisions, manipulate materials, interact with peers and adults, experience special events, reflect on ideas and actions, use language in personally meaningful ways, and receive appropriate adult support. 

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Creative Representation 

• R ecognizing objects by sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell

• Imitating actions and sounds

• Relating models, pictures, and photographs to real places and things

• Pretending and role playing

• Making models out of clay, blocks, and other materials

• Drawing and painting 

 

  Language and Literacy   

• ​Talking with others about personally meaningful experiences 

• Describing objects, events, and relations

• Having fun with language: listening to stories and poems, making up stories and rhymes

• Writing in various ways: drawing, scribbling, letterlike forms, invented spelling, conventional forms

• Reading in various ways: reading storybooks, signs and symbols, one's own writing

• Dictating stories

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Initiative and Social Relations

• Making and expressing choices, plans, and decisions

• Solving problems encountered in play

• Taking care of one's own needs

• Expressing feelings in words

• Participating in group routines

• Being sensitive to the feelings, interests, and needs of others

• Building relationships with children and adults

• Creating and experiencing collaborative play

• Dealing with social conflict 

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Movement 

• Moving in nonlocomotor ways, (anchored movement: bending, twisting, rocking, swinging one's arms)

• Moving in locomotor ways (nonanchored movement: running, jumping, hopping, skipping, marching, climbing, marching, climbing)

• Moving with objects

• Expressing creativity in movement

• Describing movement

• Acting upon movement directions

• Feeling and expressing steady beat

• Moving in sequences to a common beat

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Music 

• ​Moving to music

• Exploring and identifying sounds

• Exploring the singing voice

• Developing melody

• Singing songs

• Playing simple musical instruments

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Classification 

• Exploring and describing similarities, differences, and the attributes of things

• Distinguishing and describing shapes

• Sorting and matching

• Using and describing something in several ways

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Seriation​

• Comparing attributes (longer/shorter, bigger/smaller)

• Arranging several things one after another in a series of pattern and describing the relationships

• (big/bigger/biggest), red/blue/red/blue)

• Fitting one ordered set of objects to another through trial and error (small cup-small saucer/medium cup-medium saucer/big cup-big saucer)

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Number​

• Comparing the number of things in two sets to determine "more", "fewer". "same number"

• Arranging two sets of objects in one-to-one coorespondence

• Counting objects

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Space​​

• ​Filling and emptying

• Fitting things together and taking them apart

• Changing the shape and arrangement of objects (wrapping, twisting, stretching, stacking, enclosing)

• Observing people, places, and things from different spatial viewpoints

• Experiences and describing positions, directions, and distances in the play space, building, and neighborhood

• Interpreting spacial relations in drawings, pictures, and photographs

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Time

• ​Starting and stopping an action on signal

• Experiencing and describing rates of movement

• Experiencing and comparing time intervals

• Anticipating, remembering, and describing sequences of events

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