The useful note records what the child was trying to do

Most notes describe behaviour. The valuable ones describe intent.

Compare two notes about the same three minutes. The first says that the child built a tower with blocks and it fell over and he became upset. The second says that he was trying to make the tower taller than himself, discovered that the long blocks would not balance on the small ones, tried three times with the same arrangement rather than changing it, and was frustrated by the collapse rather than by the height. The first is a record that something occurred. The second tells you what to put out tomorrow, what conversation to have, and what this child currently believes about how the world stacks up.

Writing the second kind takes no longer than writing the first. It takes a different orientation: an assumption that the child is pursuing something coherent, and a willingness to spend a moment working out what. Children are almost never doing nothing. What looks like aimless carrying is often a self assigned transport problem. What looks like destruction is often a test of whether the effect repeats. The habit of asking what is this child attempting, before writing a single word, changes the output more than any template ever will.

Two practical notes. Write in the child's terms rather than in the vocabulary of adult goals, because the translation into goals can happen later but the original detail cannot be recovered once it is lost. And write quickly and roughly, close to the moment. A rough note taken at the time beats a polished paragraph reconstructed three days later from a photograph, every single time. Legibility to yourself is enough. These are working documents and treating them as publications is how the practice slowly becomes performance.