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

#### Domain: NC Foundations for Early Learning: Language Development and Communication (LDC)

#### Subdomain: Learning to Communicate

#### Goal: Children use most grammatical constructions of their home language well.

#### Skill Progression: Use most grammatical constructions of home language well

#### Age: 27-30 Months

Click here to go to all skills for ages 27-30 Months.

### Produces have and do as auxiliary verbs (“Do you like apples?”)

Situations for Observation of Skill

Observe adult reading a book to a child and during daily routines.

Elicitation Strategy

Elicit present progressives by asking, “What is he doing?” Elicit prepositions by asking, “Where did she hide the doll?” Elicit plurals by asking, “What are those?” (trucks, animals, etc.)

Behavior Observed

The child tells what is happening, where, and to whom by adding the –ing ending, using prepositions and plurals.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

Encourage early childhood educators and parents to play and read with the child. Explain that this is a great way to model new grammatical structures and help the child use them in appropriate ways within a meaningful context. Encourage adults to be aware of the use of plurals and present progressive endings. They should model the use of such endings (e.g., “You are building a tower. I built a tower. Now we have two towers.”) Adults can also ask questions that require the child to use them (“What is the girl in this picture doing?”)

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/.