Connect intentional teaching with children's development and learning.
Explore activities, teaching strategies, classroom ideas, observation opportunities, and planning resources organized around the Early Learning Outcomes Framework domains.
The Early Learning Outcomes Framework provides a developmental foundation for thinking about what children know, understand, and can do. Use these resources to connect observations, classroom experiences, teaching strategies, and intentional planning.
Notice what children are demonstrating during everyday experiences.
Connect children's actions and behaviors with developmental learning.
Choose strategies and experiences that extend children's learning.
Use what you learn to determine meaningful next steps.
Select a domain to explore activities, strategies, classroom experiences, and observation ideas.
Support children's curiosity, initiative, persistence, attention, flexibility, and engagement as they explore and learn.
Build relationships, emotional awareness, self regulation, social interaction, cooperation, and a developing sense of self.
Encourage children to listen, understand, communicate, participate in conversations, and express their thoughts and ideas.
Support children's growing understanding of books, print, sounds, writing, stories, symbols, and meaningful communication.
Encourage thinking, reasoning, memory, mathematical concepts, scientific inquiry, problem solving, and knowledge of the world.
Support children's growing coordination, movement, physical health, perceptual skills, and independence in everyday routines.
ELOF aligned teaching does not require turning every classroom experience into a formal lesson. Meaningful learning often happens through play, routines, conversations, relationships, exploration, and responsive interactions.
Use these strategies throughout the day to notice learning and intentionally extend it.
Invite children to explain their thinking, make predictions, describe experiences, and consider possibilities.
Demonstrate language, problem solving, social interaction, movement, literacy, and other skills within meaningful classroom experiences.
Provide just enough support to help children move toward greater independence.
Use children's questions, interests, discoveries, and play as opportunities for deeper learning.
Add materials, vocabulary, questions, challenges, or new perspectives that move learning forward.
Use observations to determine what children may be ready to explore, practice, or experience next.
Intentional teaching can happen anywhere. Look for opportunities throughout the day.
Encourage language, social interaction, problem solving, symbolic thinking, cooperation, and self regulation.
Multiple DomainsExplore spatial relationships, mathematics, planning, persistence, communication, and fine motor development.
Multiple DomainsEncourage children to observe, predict, investigate, compare, communicate, and explain what they discover.
CognitionBuild vocabulary, comprehension, conversation, print awareness, listening, and connections between stories and children's experiences.
Language and LiteracyProvide opportunities for expression, experimentation, decision making, coordination, language, and persistence.
Multiple DomainsSupport movement, observation, social interaction, scientific inquiry, risk awareness, and exploration.
Multiple DomainsA child's learning may be visible in a conversation, a block structure, a drawing, a movement experience, a conflict with a peer, a science discovery, or an everyday routine.
Instead of asking only whether an activity was completed, ask what the child demonstrated during the experience.
What did the child do?
What did the child communicate?
What strategy did the child use?
What might the child be ready for next?
Use your observations to determine what children are demonstrating and how you can intentionally extend their learning.
Observe closely. Respond intentionally. Create meaningful experiences. Then use what children show you to decide what comes next.
Explore the Domains