The yearbook is the year's only report

Short answer: keep a daily record of one photo, one quote, and one sentence, let monthly pages build from it, and at each birthday turn the year into a book with the child's own words at the end. That book is the assessment. There is no other report.

Why a book, not a card#

A report card compresses a year into a grade. A yearbook expands it into what actually happened: the water table in March, the first three-word sentence in Dhivehi, the ant project that lasted five weeks, the ladder she climbed alone in October. Adults look harder when they are making a book. Children take their work seriously when they see it kept. And a grandparent on another island can hold it.

What goes in#

• Month pages. Six to ten photos, two or three quotes with translations, one line from the parents. The child's drawing of the month.
• Project panels. For each project: what she wondered, what she did, what she found, what she said.
• Ladders. Which rungs she reached, and when, with the photo.
• Languages. First words, favourite words, the share each language got over the year.
• Outside. Places, classes, trips, the people she played with.
• Her words. At the birthday: what I am good at, what I am learning, what is hard. In her words, written down.
• Grandparents' messages. A line each.

How to make it possible#

The yearbook is only possible if the record exists. That means:

1. One photo of the work and one quote a day, tagged with the block and language.
2. A two-minute review at bedtime that picks a highlight.
3. A monthly hour that curates the month's page and moves ladder markers.
4. A birthday session that reads the year and writes down her words.

Each step is small. Together they make the book almost assemble itself.

The birthday rewrite#

The yearbook has a second job. Reading the year shows what she was drawn to, what she avoided, where the language split drifted, which classes fit and which did not. That is the data for next year's plan. The plan for two to three can be written from a book; the plan for four to six should be rewritten each birthday from your own documentation.

Sharing it#

Grandparents should get a weekly highlight through the year, not just the book at the end. A link that expires, with six moments and captions in their language, keeps them in the loop and gives the child another speaker of the heritage language. Their recorded stories can go in the book.