How to Plan an ELECT-Aligned Program From Observations — Without Naming a Child

Every Ontario ECE supervisor has run into the same wall: the curriculum framework expects you to plan around each child's actual development, but the document you're planning into gets posted somewhere every parent in the room can read it. So what do you actually write down?

This guide covers what Ontario's pedagogy framework and Toronto's AQI rubric actually expect from a program plan, why "individualizing" it has been harder than it sounds, and what we changed in Root Skills' Weekly Plan to make it possible without exposing a single child's information to the whole room.

What "Planning an ELECT-Aligned Program" Actually Means

Definition: An ELECT-aligned weekly program is a plan of daily learning experiences that maps each activity to a specific domain or learning area from ELECT (Early Learning for Every Child Today) — Ontario's foundational pedagogical framework — while reflecting the documented observations, interests, and developmental goals of the children actually enrolled in that room. It is distinct from a generic activity calendar in that every activity is traceable back to both a curriculum tag and a reason it was chosen for this specific group of children.

That second half — "for this specific group of children" — is where most weekly planning breaks down. It's easy to fill a calendar with age-appropriate activities. It's much harder to make every one of them respond to something you actually observed in your room this month, for nine ELECT learning areas, five days a week, every single week.

Why Individualizing the Plan Isn't Optional — It's What the Framework Asks For

Ontario's regulatory and pedagogical foundation for licensed childcare is built around exactly this expectation. Under the Child Care and Early Years Act, 2014, every licensee must have a program statement consistent with the Minister's Policy Statement on Programming and Pedagogy, and that policy statement names How Does Learning Happen? Ontario's Pedagogy for the Early Years as the document licensed programs are expected to follow. HDLH is explicit that programming should come from observing and reflecting on children — not from a pre-set activity bank.

Definition: Individualized programming is the practice of basing planned learning experiences on documented observations of the specific children in a room — their interests, developmental goals, and the cues educators pick up day to day — rather than on a generic, age-banded activity plan. Under HDLH, this is treated as the default expectation for licensed programming in Ontario, not an enhancement.

If you're in Toronto, here's exactly how this shows up in AQI. Toronto Children's Services' AQI Preschool Guidelines score a category called "Program Plan," and one of the listed criteria under "Exceeds Expectations" is evidence that individual goals of children are incorporated into the Program Plan — achieved through observation notes, an Individual Program Plan, meeting minutes, or directly on the Program Plan itself. The same guidelines also require a supervisor to review and sign the weekly Program Plan, by someone other than the educator who wrote it. So this isn't an abstract pedagogical nicety — it's something an assessor can mark "Does Not Meet Expectations" against, and something a supervisor is on record reviewing every week.

The Part Nobody Talks About: That Same Plan Is Usually Posted Publicly

Here's the tension. The same AQI guidelines that ask for individual goals on the Program Plan also expect that plan to be posted somewhere accessible to parents, staff, students, and visitors. That's true well beyond Toronto, too — posting a weekly plan or program board where families can see it is standard practice in most Ontario rooms, AQI or not.

So picture the actual situation: a child in your room needs constant reassurance and physical affection to feel secure, and you've correctly logged that as an observation. Incorporating that into the plan — say, by building in extra one-on-one check-ins during transitions — is exactly what the framework wants you to do. But writing "extra reassurance for [child's name]" on a plan taped to the wall, where every other parent in the room walks past it at pickup, is a problem most supervisors solve by quietly not doing it. Either the plan stays generic and the "individual goals" box goes unanswered, or the goal gets written down somewhere a child's name and a sensitive flag shouldn't be sitting in plain sight.

This is the actual reason individualized programming so often collapses into "themed activities for the whole room" in practice — not because educators don't know better, but because the honest version of doing it right has a privacy problem nobody built a real answer to.

What We Changed: A Focus Setting on the Weekly Plan

We just shipped a change to Root Skills' "From observations" planning mode that's built directly around that problem.

Previously, "From observations" pulled flags from across the whole room — self-regulation, peer conflict, gross motor, emotional regulation, and so on — and generated a week of activities responding to the room as a whole. That's still there, and it's still the default.

Now there's a Focus setting. Leave it on "Whole room" and nothing changes. Switch it to an individual child, and the plan generation shifts to that one child's specific observation flags — weaving their particular need into the week's activities — while the generated plan itself never names them. The activity descriptions, the materials, the coaching notes all reflect that child's real, documented need. The document you post on the wall doesn't.

In practice, this means a supervisor can satisfy "evidence that individual goals of children are incorporated into the Program Plan" — one of AQI's own listed methods is literally "directly on the Program Plan" — for every child in the room, every week, without a single name or flag becoming visible to a parent who has no reason to see another family's information.

What Else Changed: Example Photos and Setup Details on Every Activity

The second update is smaller but solves a different everyday problem. Every activity cell in the Weekly Plan now has an Examples option. Tap it, and instead of just a one-line activity title, you get a Pinterest-style example photo, a clearer description of what the activity actually looks like in practice, an expandable materials-and-setup breakdown, and a short coaching tip for using the activity with the specific flag or learning goal it's tagged to.

This replaces a habit most educators already have — opening Pinterest or Google Images in a second tab to figure out what "community helper collage boards" should actually look like before they can shop for materials or brief their team. The reference image and the materials list are now attached to the same cell the curriculum tag and the developmental goal already live on, so there's one less tab and one less translation step between "here's the activity" and "here's how to actually run it tomorrow."

How This Fits Into the Rest of Weekly Plan

Nothing about the existing structure changed — this builds on top of it. Root Skills' Weekly Plan still generates across nine ELECT learning areas, five days a week, with three ways to start: from observations (now with the Focus setting), from a theme you supply, or day-by-day with a free-text "AI Regenerate" option per cell. Every cell is still tagged to a specific ELECT sub-domain — 4.3 Representation, 2.2 Self-Regulation, 1.3 Cooperation, and so on — so the curriculum traceability AQI and your own supervisor sign-off depend on hasn't gone anywhere. The Focus setting and Examples are additions to that workflow, not a replacement for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I plan an ELECT-aligned program? Start from documented observations rather than a generic activity bank — most Ontario programs use a curriculum-planning tool or a Program Plan template that ties each day's activities to a specific ELECT learning area or developmental domain, and reviews those observations on a regular cycle (weekly is standard) to keep the plan responsive to the children actually in the room.

Does Ontario require individualized program planning, or is that just best practice? It's built into the framework licensed programs are required to follow. Under O. Reg. 137/15 of the Child Care and Early Years Act, every licensee must have a program statement consistent with How Does Learning Happen? Ontario's Pedagogy for the Early Years, which treats observation-based, individualized programming as the standard approach — not an optional enhancement.

What does AQI actually check for in the Program Plan? Toronto's AQI Preschool Guidelines score a "Program Plan" category that includes whether learning areas are planned and documented for the week, whether the plan reflects the children actually enrolled, and — at the "Exceeds Expectations" level — whether individual goals are incorporated, via observation notes, an Individual Program Plan, meeting minutes, or directly on the plan itself. A supervisor (someone other than the writer) is also expected to review and sign the plan weekly.

How do I show individual goals on a program plan without naming a child? The safest approach is to let the individual need shape the activity — the materials, the framing, the one-on-one moment built into the day — without the posted document naming whose need it is. Root Skills' Weekly Plan now does this automatically: set the Focus to a specific child and the generated activities respond to their flags, but the plan itself stays name-free.

Can I post my program plan publicly if a child's specific needs are written into it? That's the exact tension most supervisors run into, since program plans are typically posted somewhere parents and visitors can see them. The practical answer is to keep anything that could identify a specific child's sensitive information off the publicly posted document, even if that need is what shaped the activity behind the scenes.

Where do most ECEs actually find activity ideas? Pinterest and Google Image searches are extremely common — it's a normal part of how educators translate a one-line activity idea into something they can actually set up and run. The friction is usually in connecting that visual idea back to the specific curriculum tag and developmental goal it's supposed to serve, which is what we built the in-plan Examples feature to close.

What's the difference between planning "from the whole room" and planning "from one child"? Whole-room planning aggregates flags across every child's recent observations and builds a week that responds to the room in general — it's the right default for most weeks. Individual-focus planning narrows the same process to one child's specific flags, useful when a particular need (a transition struggle, a regulation flag, a specific interest) warrants activities built around them specifically, without changing who can see what on the resulting plan.

How often should a supervisor review the weekly plan? Weekly is the standard expectation under Toronto's AQI rubric, and it's good practice province-wide regardless of whether AQI applies to your centre — ideally reviewed and signed off by someone other than whoever wrote it, to keep the curriculum tagging and individual goals consistent before the plan goes up for the week.

The Bottom Line

Ontario's pedagogy framework, and Toronto's AQI rubric specifically, expect program planning to be individualized — built from real, documented observations of the children in the room, not a generic activity calendar. The part that's gone unsolved is that the document where this is supposed to show up is usually posted somewhere every family can see it, which means most supervisors have been quietly choosing between doing it right and keeping it private.

That's the actual problem the Focus setting in Root Skills' Weekly Plan is built to remove — and the new Examples feature handles the smaller, everyday version of the same gap between "here's an activity idea" and "here's exactly how to run it tomorrow." If you're already on Root Skills, both are live now in the Weekly Plan — try the Focus setting on this week's plan. If you're not yet a customer, you can try the full Weekly Plan (and everything else) free for 14 days, no credit card required, at rootskills.ca.

For more on the framework underneath all of this, see our complete guide to the ELECT framework, our guide to writing a developmental observation that actually feeds a plan like this, and — for Toronto supervisors specifically — how to prepare for AQI.

Sources: Ontario Ministry of Education, "How Does Learning Happen? Ontario's Pedagogy for the Early Years" (2014, reissued 2021); Minister's Policy Statement on Programming and Pedagogy, issued under subsection 55(3) of the Child Care and Early Years Act, 2014 (June 8, 2015); O. Reg. 137/15 (General) under the Child Care and Early Years Act, 2014, s.46; Toronto Children's Services, "Assessment for Quality Improvement Guidelines | Preschool" (2017), Category 2: Program Plan.