Portfolios go High-Tech!

The Future is here today with on-line portfolios!

Children's Castle has been a leader in the child care industry in the area of children's portfolios! Since 1994, Children's Castle and its parent company, Bexley Child Care Center, has made it a priority to create portfolios for our students!

Back in 1994, we created a format for doing portfolios, which was to use a paper form for collecting, categorizing and organizing written documentation, which we call "Journal Entries." This paper form listed the developmental categories of early childhood, such as large motor, small motor, math, science, language, etc. Within a few years, the teachers had begun to add photos for each of the journal entries. Soon they were also getting very creative with decorating the pages with clip art! Our portfolios totally rock!

All together, a student's portfolio generally contains the following 3 types of items:

• A collection of the student's work (artwork, early writing samples, math worksheets, etc.)
• Assessments from each parent-teacher conference (we do 2 per year)
• A collection of Journal Entries that the teachers have created using our form

In the fall of 2010, we began to explore putting our portfolio program on-line, and a project called LifeCubby began to take shape. The advantages for an on-line system are many:

• Parents will have their child's portfolio electronic where it will never get damaged or lost!
• Parents can add a lot more to their child's portfolio, far beyond what their teachers can do
• Since the on-line photo-upload tool is quick and easy, teachers will be able to do MORE portfolio entries for each student
• LifeCubby is still in it's "infancy" stage and will continue to grow as a beneficial tool for both parents and teachers! New tools & features will continue to be added to LifeCubby!
• Best of all, we decided that LifeCubby was too good to keep to ourselves, so we made it available on-line for FREE for parents and teachers anywhere!

Click here for more information on LifeCubby