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 identify and use common shapes and concepts about position during play and other activities.

Skill Progression: Composes geometric shapes

Age: 42-48 Months

Click here to go to all skills for ages 42-48 Months.

Combines two or more shapes to create a new shape or to represent an object in the environment

Situations for Observation of Skill

Have a variety of different shapes of materials, such as paper shapes of different sizes and colors, toothpicks, googly eyes, marshmallows, small blocks and tape.

Elicitation Strategy

Ask the children to look around the room and pick one thing they want to recreate. See if you can guess what they made.

Behavior Observed

Children will combine shapes in different ways to create a likeness of something in the room.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

Art activities are a great way to incorporate geometric thinking and spatial understanding. Creating silly objects, such as monsters is even more fun, as children don’t feel the pressure of having to make something look exactly like it does in the real world.

 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/.