A simple explanation of what the report tells you—and what it deliberately leaves out.
When a teacher watches your little one, she does not turn the moment into a mark. She chooses the sentence that best matches what happened—for example, “stacks five blocks and holds them steady.” There are five such sentences for each thing we observe, from the earliest step to the most developed one.
The number you may see beside a sentence is only a label that helps the report stay organised. The sentence is what tells the story.
The five steps are an order, not a measuring tape. Moving from one step to the next does not represent the same-sized change. They describe stages, not units. So adding them together and dividing would create a precise-looking number that does not describe anything real.
Averaging the steps could give you something like 3.4. But there is no sentence for 3.4. It cannot tell you what your child actually did, or what the number is supposed to mean. We would rather give you something you can understand and trace back to a real observation.
Instead, we show the step that appears most often and how many observations it came from. So you can read it as something real: “usually — stacks five blocks and holds them steady, 7 of 9 times.” The number supports the sentence; it does not replace it.
Every number in the report has a simple job: it counts something that was observed, marks when something first happened, or shows part of a count. That is all.
A two- or three-year-old is a person growing every day, not a collection of results. What we can honestly share is what your little one chose, what they did, what changed, and when something first happened—in the words of the people who were there. That gives a family something useful to talk about, rather than a number to worry about.
If something in the report is unclear, ask the teacher. They were there when it happened; the screen was not.