Early Childhood Standards & Instructional Supports

Virginia's Early Learning and Development Standards (ELDS), Birth-Five Learning Guidelines

Virginia has a unified set of comprehensive early learning and development standards for young children, birth to age five.

A core component of a high-quality early education experience is that children are provided opportunities, experiences, and materials that allow them to engage deeply within developmental/early learning domains to build their school readiness skills. Virginia's Early Learning and Development Standards (ELDS), Birth-Five Learning Guidelines articulate the skills and knowledge young children need to demonstrate by the end of preschool in order to be successful in kindergarten.

The standards are intended to help early childhood educators understand the basics of child development implement effective classroom activities, and engage in high-quality teacher child interactions.

The Virginia's Early Learning and Development Standards (ELDS), Birth-Five Learning Guidelines (Spanish) focus on five Areas of Development:

1. Approaches to Play and Learning
2. Social and Emotional Development
3. Communication, Language, and Literacy Development 
4. Health and Physical Development
5. Cognitive Development (Science, Social Sciences: People, Community and Culture, Mathematics and Fine Arts) 

With the goal of ensuring all Virginia children have an opportunity to enter kindergarten ready to thrive, the standards have been developed to support birth to five programs to:

• Use quality instructional tools and engage in aligned professional development, 

• Individualize care and instruction to meet the needs of all learners, and 

• Promote holistic and intentional learning and development at each age and stage.

Virginia's ELDS act as a foundational set of classroom guidelines that support the Commonwealth's unified quality measurement system known as VQB5. Through VQB5, early childhood programs are supported to effectively implement these standards through quality teaching practices and curriculum use. Families can view program Quality Profiles that show how programs support children's development across these important areas of learning.

The ELDS Micro-credential

Through participation in the Micro-credential, early childhood caregivers and educators will:  

Available to all publicly-funded early childhood professionals, interested participants may register for annual cohorts of learners. The course is available at no-cost, is non-credit-bearing, online, self-, and competency-based. Registration information is regularly published in Readiness Connections. To find out more contact Rebecca Shaffer: Rebecca.Shaffer@doe.virginia.gov. 

The ECE Resource Hub  

This early childhood resource hub offers educators and families monthly resources to support children birth to five, including booklists, read aloud guides, and lesson plans to support developmental skills. 

Resources to Support English Language Learners (ELLs)  

Virginia educators have free access the WIDA Early Years Making Connections and self-paced eLearning modules.  

The Making Connections document is:

• Aligned to VA’s ELDS.
• Offers suggestions, tools and sample plans for supporting learning for multilingual children. Supports positive teacher-child interaction  
• WIDA Early Years resources feature language development strategies that are benefit all children, regardless of language backgrounds. Visit the resource library. 

Early Learning Support Webinars

• Early Learning Supports Winter Webinar Recording,  Slides (January 2024, ~28min)