Every childcare center is unique, and your child development approach should be too! With Famly's Curriculum Builder, you have the flexibility to create a curriculum that perfectly fits your center's needs.
Whether you prefer starting from a template or building your curriculum from scratch, the power is in your hands. This guide will walk you through the process of setting up your own personalized curriculum, but remember—how it turns out is entirely up to you!
Permissions for the Curriculum Builder
Before you begin, make sure that any staff responsible for creating curricula have the right permissions. To do so, head to Settings → Staff → Roles and permissions → Compare roles → scroll down to the Learning section → and check Create, edit and delete child development curriculum. You're good to go!
Create a Curriculum
It's time to start creating a custom curriculum. Head to the Learning tab in your sidebar and click on Curriculum builder. If you haven't created any curricula before, click the Create curriculum button.
Next up, choose whether you'd like to Use a template or Design your own curriculum. If you're using a template, you can click on the suggested learning areas and edit if needed. If you choose to design your own, give your learning areas a color, name, abbreviation and choose whether you'd like to be able to link them when you make observations and assessments.
☝️ Note: Observations and assessments can only be logged at the Primary Learning area level. Subareas are solely for digital curriculum reference material for staff. If you plan to perform Observations and/or Assessments against subareas, please utilize more primary learning areas rather than implementing subareas.
Pages can be added to provide more information for your curriculum and additional reference material. In each learning area, you can create subareas. For example, you may want to have Geometry and Counting as subareas under your Math learning area.
Create as many subareas as you like, and add pages for each one.
Enabling your Curriculum: Learning Frameworks and Reference Material
Once you've created your curriculum, you must add it to your settings in three ways:
Go to:
Settings → Child development → Setup
Activate: When toggling this, all staff will be able to see and use the new child development features. No data will be lost. Note that you'll have to have the newest app version to use the new child development
-OR-
Activate for me: When toggling this, only you will be able to see and use the new child development features. Enabling just for you at first gives you the comfort to set up new child development settings before everyone starts using it. We also recommend this option if you just want to test it out for yourself first. All observations and assessments that you create will be visible to parents and teachers, so we recommend that you create a test child.
Settings → Child development → Reference material
Toggle on by custom curriculum name
Settings → Child development → Learning frameworks
Toggle on by custom curriculum name
Assessment Settings
Set up your custom assessment configurations and assessment key in Famly. This is a wonderful way to provide digital progress reports to parents ahead of or for parent-teacher conferences.
Here you can set up how you want your assessments to work. Assessments are point-in-time reviews of a child's progress. Assessments, once completed, are saved to the child's learning Journey (found in the Child Profile, and viewable by both staff and parents).
You can enable one or many assessment types dependent on your site's needs. You can also enable age bands within a given assessment type.
Settings → Child development → Assessment settings
Click
Create your own configurationFollow the prompts, including:
Title: create a title for the assessment typeAssess against: choose the curriculum this assessment is tied toInclude age bandscheckbox: add age bands if relevantInclude assessment optionscheckbox: click yes, and then create your assessment key, such as "needs support", "progressing well", "mastered" or other levels of review tailored to your site, philosophy and/or curriculumInclude reflectionscheckbox: click yes to allow for free text notes per learning area of the curriculum, when completing an assessment
☝️ Note: in the US, you can keep the Development Matters and Birth to 5 Matters guidance toggled off. These are UK-specific.
Parent options
Settings → Child development → Assessment settings
Parent options allow you to allow or block parents from being able to make child observations from home, and allow or block parents from printing/downloading their children's learning journey from the child's profile.
💡 Famly recommends having both settings toggled on if you are using Child Development in Famly!
Applying your Curriculum
Once all settings above have been enabled, you're all set to start using your custom curriculum and assessments in both: Assessments and Observations.
When you create an Observation or Assessment, your custom curriculum will be available as an option.
Once selected, you can add specific primary learning areas, and consult your reference material to write a detailed report on the child's development.
Child Development: Overview
In Child development → Overview, you'll see your Observations and Assessments listed and the abbreviations for your Learning areas attached to each one. You can filter the report by date, child and author (teacher) to see child development logging over time.
Child Development: Reports
In Child development → Reports, you'll see various reports offered by Famly regarding Child development.
Observation counts: show a summary of observations, by child and learning area, to summarize where you (directors or teachers) may want to spend more time assessing or observing specific children.
Progress report: show how children are progressing, across each primary Learning area, based on your custom assessment key.