North Carolina Early Learning and Development Progressions: Birth to Five

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

Subdomain: Creative Expression

Goal: Children demonstrate self-expression and creativity in a variety of forms and contexts, including play, visual arts, music, drama, and dance.

Skill Progression: Art

Age: 27-30 Months

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

Squeezes, flattens, and puts chunks of play dough together and takes them apart

Situations for Observation of Skill

Provide play dough for the child to manipulate.

Elicitation Strategy

Let the child experiment with the play dough independently. If the child is limited to one repeated action, an adult can model different actions (pulling apart, putting together, rolling, flattening, etc.)

Behavior Observed

See if the child is able to perform a variety of actions on the play dough. This indicates he has many ideas for what to do with the material.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

Encourage parents to provide an easily cleanable space (on a cookie tray, on newspaper or a plastic cloth) for the child to experiment with different types of art materials, including paints, play, dough, etc. The more comfortable the child is with different materials, the more he will be able to combine them in different ways.

 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/.