North Carolina Early Learning and Development Progressions: Birth to Five

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

Subdomain: Foundations for Reading

Goal: Children develop phonological awareness.

Skill Progression: Develop phonological awareness

Age: 27-30 Months

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

Understands the difference between words with similar phonemes such as “pat” and “path”

Situations for Observation of Skill

Read a familiar book to the child.

Elicitation Strategy

When reading the book, the adult can stop occasionally at a word and ask the child, “Should I say, X or Y?” For example, when reading Goodnight Moon, the adult says, “Is it moon or noon?”; “chairs or hairs?”; “mouse or moose?”, etc.

Behavior Observed

The child differentiates similar sounds and identifies the right sound to use in a word.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

Hearing individual sounds and distinguishing them from one another is a critical literacy skill. The child who has difficulty with this skill struggles with phonemic awareness. If this is a problem for the child, help early childhood educators and parents learn how to enunciate the sounds when they read and do sound play imitation games.

 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/.