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 compare, sort, group, organize and measure objects and create patterns in their everyday environment.

Skill Progression: Comparing and Ordering

Age: 24-27 Months

Click here to go to all skills for ages 24-27 Months.

Stacks five circular rings in correct size order

Situations for Observation of Skill

Provide nesting boxes and stacking toy.

Elicitation Strategy

Let the child take them apart and put them back together. While the child is playing with one toy, the adult can play with the other. This keeps the feel of play rather than just watching the child do a task. Then switch toys with the child.

Behavior Observed

The child completes both tasks successfully.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

Children at this level can compare global relations rather than increments. For example, they know the labels for outermost limits of a concept, such as big and little, but not the increments in between (big, bigger, or biggest). Therefore, they can only compare two things at a time. To help children learn size sequencing, compare just two objects at a time.

 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/.