📈 My Goals & Progress Tracker
Your child’s goals down the left, eight weeks across the top. Ticking the boxes shows you the slow progress that is almost impossible to notice day to day.
How to use it at home
- Pick 2–4 goals, no more — one skill each, written so anyone in the house could tell whether it happened.
- Write today’s starting point beside each goal, even if the starting point is nothing yet.
- Each week, tick the box only if you genuinely saw it — an honest tick is worth more than a kind one.
- Add one line about what seemed to help, so you can do more of it next week.
- Look back after a month, and take the sheet to your next therapy session or school meeting.
A quick preview — here’s what you’ll print:
| My goals | W1 | W2 | W3 | W4 | W5 | W6 | W7 | W8 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | |
| ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | |
| ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | |
| ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
- Pick 2–4 goals, no more — one skill each, written so anyone in the house could tell whether it happened.
- Write today’s starting point beside each goal, even if the starting point is nothing yet.
- Each week, tick the box only if you genuinely saw it — an honest tick is worth more than a kind one.
- Add one line about what seemed to help, so you can do more of it next week.
- Look back after a month, and take the sheet to your next therapy session or school meeting.
Pairs with our free step-by-step home program for a late talker at inclusivetherapycentre.com/home-programs
Why this helps
A progress tracker is one sheet of paper: your child’s goals down the left, eight weeks across the top, a box to tick each week. Those ticks slowly draw a picture of the one thing that is almost impossible to see while you are living it — change. Progress in children is slow and uneven, so day to day it can honestly feel like nothing is happening, and that feeling is one of the main reasons families quietly stop practising at home. Written down, the same small gains become countable. It sits alongside the rest of our free printable toolkit for parents, but it is the only sheet in there that is really a record rather than an activity.
The tracker only works as well as the goals you put in it. “Talk more” cannot be ticked. “Asks for water by saying water at mealtimes, with one reminder” can. Aim for one skill per line, written so plainly that a grandparent who was not in the room could still tell you whether it happened. Milestone guidance from bodies such as the CDC and the NHS is written in exactly that observable way, so copy the style, and the way we set therapy goals shows the same wording applied to real children. Then write today’s starting point beside each goal, even when the starting point is nothing yet — because eight weeks from now you will not reliably remember how things really were. Goals that sit inside an ordinary daily routine move fastest, which is why the visual daily routine chart pairs so well with this sheet. If the goal is about naming a feeling rather than saying a word, keep the feelings chart beside the tracker, so the practice and the record live in the same place.
A goal can also be moving before any tick arrives, and this is the part parents most often miss. Watch three things: whether your child needs fewer reminders, whether the skill turns up in a new place or with a different person, and whether your child is trying more often even when it comes out wrong. In our clinic those usually shift first — understanding grows before talking, willingness grows before accuracy, and frustration settles before the difficult behaviour disappears. It is the same order we look for when we measure progress between reviews. If you can, record a sixty-second video or voice note in week one and another in week eight. Memory is a poor instrument for this. A phone is not.
Expect dips. A flat fortnight after a chest infection, a house move, exam season or a new baby is information, not failure. A week full of meltdowns still gets written down, along with whatever settled things afterwards — for a lot of families that is the calm-down steps card, and knowing what helped is worth as much as the tick. Children often plateau for a while just before something new appears. What matters is the shape across eight weeks, never one week. If a goal has genuinely not moved after about six weeks of steady practice, the usual reason is not effort — it is that the step is too big. Break it into a smaller one, or take it to your child’s therapist and ask for it to be rewritten.
If your home runs on more than one language, count them together. A child growing up with Urdu, Saraiki or Punjabi alongside English is building one vocabulary, not two half-sized ones, so a word counts whichever language it arrives in — and mixing two languages inside one sentence is normal, not a sign of confusion. Write each word on the tracker in the language your child actually says it in. Parents here are often advised to drop one language so the child can catch up; that rarely helps, and it usually costs a child the language their grandparents speak. What does help is set out in our guide to raising a child in a bilingual home.
Bring the finished sheet with you. A tracker turns “I don’t think he’s really improving” into a record someone can read in thirty seconds, which makes a review appointment, a school meeting or a WhatsApp message to us far more useful than a description from memory. Mahnoor Baloch, our Speech & Language Therapist, usually asks a parent to bring theirs to the next session so goals get adjusted rather than guessed at. One caution: a tracker records, it does not diagnose. If your child loses a skill they clearly had before, stops responding to their name, or you simply feel worried, do not wait for the eight weeks to finish — ask for an assessment. If you are unsure whether it is time, our free two-minute development check is a gentle place to start. Nothing on this sheet should ever delay that conversation.
Tips for using it well
- Do keep it to a handful of goals — a tracker with ten lines on it gets abandoned by week three.
- Don’t write a goal you cannot tick; if two people in the house could disagree about whether it happened, rewrite it smaller.
- Do tick honestly, blank weeks included. A tracker you flatter is a tracker you cannot use.
- Do jot one line about what seemed to help that week — the thing that worked is usually more useful later than the score.
- Don’t compare the sheet with another child’s. The only fair comparison is your own child in week one.
- Do keep it somewhere everyone sees it, like the fridge or a cupboard door, so whoever is with your child that day can tick it.
Common questions
How often should I fill in a progress tracker?
Once a week is enough, and weekly is far easier to keep up than daily. Pick a fixed moment — Sunday evening suits most families — and tick only what you actually saw during that week. The point of a progress tracker is to catch the overall direction over a couple of months, not to record every single day.
How do I write a goal I can actually tick?
Write one skill per line, in words that describe something you could see or hear. “Speaks better” cannot be ticked. “Says two words together, such as more milk, at least once a day” can be ticked. A good home goal is small enough to shift within a few weeks, happens inside an ordinary daily routine, and would be judged the same way by anyone else in the house.
What if a goal is not improving at all?
First, well done for noticing — that is exactly what a tracker is for. A goal that has not moved after about six weeks of steady practice is usually too big rather than impossible, so break it into a smaller step and start again. If a smaller step still does not help, or your child seems to be slipping backwards, ask a speech and language therapist or your child’s doctor to look at it rather than pushing on alone.
My child hears Urdu and English at home — which words do I count?
Count them together. A bilingual child is building one vocabulary across both languages, so a word counts whether it arrives in Urdu, Saraiki, Punjabi or English, and mixing languages inside a sentence is normal at this age. Write each word on the tracker in the language your child truly uses. Dropping the family language so a child can catch up is rarely the right move.
Should my child see the tracker?
For school-age children, yes. Seeing their own ticks build up is motivating and gives them a share in the goal, so keep the wording kind and keep it about effort rather than results. For toddlers and preschoolers a written tracker means very little; a star or sticker chart they can decorate themselves works far better, and the weekly reward chart does that job.
Written by the Inclusive Developmental and Therapy Center therapy team · medically reviewed by Dr Muhammad Suffyan, MB BS (GMC 8023727) · Last reviewed July 2026
Want help using these with your child?
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