## North Carolina Early Learning and Development Progressions: Birth to Five

#### Domain: NC Foundations for Early Learning: Cognitive Development (CD)

#### Subdomain: Mathematical Thinking and Expression

#### Goal: Children identify and use common shapes and concepts about position during play and other activities.

#### Skill Progression: Spatial understanding

#### Age: 30-33 Months

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### Attempts to imitate building a bridge with blocks

Situations for Observation of Skill

During playtime have a variety of shape blocks, measuring cups (without long handles) or stacking cups, and a shape puzzle, trucks, small people and farm animals in a bag or two.

Elicitation Strategy

Use the round block as a “pond” and tell the child that the animals need a bridge to cross the pond. Demonstrate how to make a bridge. Let the child try to build one as well.

Behavior Observed

The child attempts to imitate the adult’s bridge across the “pond,” but may not be successful.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

Encourage early childhood educators and parents to be play partners with the child with blocks and other items. They can then suggest more complex play ideas and model problem solving for the child. Adults can also use location terms to increase the child’s vocabulary for spatial terms.

North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, 2015

©2015 by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.