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

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

#### Subdomain: Foundations for Writing

#### Goal: Children use writing skills and writing conventions.

#### Skill Progression: Use writing skills and writing conventions

#### Age: 48-54 Months

Click here to go to all skills for ages 48-54 Months.

### Tries to imitate the letters in own name and some family member’s names

Situations for Observation of Skill

Observe the child writing her ideas on paper

Elicitation Strategy

Give each child a large piece of paper. Ask the children to draw a large square on the top half of the page, like one that the adult shows them. Ask them to draw a picture of their family inside the square. Under the square ask the children to write the names of the people in their picture and something about them. The adult can draw a model for a child if needed.

Behavior Observed

The child knows how to write her name, or at least the first letter or predominant consonant sounds. Letters produced in the right sequence, but may not be written in the right order on the paper.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

It is important for early childhood educators to understand that all of their children are in different places in the writing sequence, and they may regress when the task is too difficult. For this reason, early childhood educators need to understand each child’s level of proficiency and build on that. Using the same worksheet with the whole class will leave some frustrated and falling back to earlier developmental levels. On the other hand, some will be unchallenged and not learn the next level. Have children write spontaneously starting with their names and names of family members. These are familiar, motivating, and easiest to learn. Write down words children want to learn.

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/.