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: 48-54 Months

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

Counts syllables in names and simple words

Situations for Observation of Skill

Present words from some sentences in a book and see if the child can determine the number of syllables in the words.

Elicitation Strategy

The adult picks several of the longer words and asks the child to, “Tap your fingers for each syllable, or part of the word.” Demonstrate by tapping your first, second and third fingers as you say, “Straw-ber-ry. It has three syllables.”

Behavior Observed

The child determines how many syllables are in a word.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

Talk about syllables and how they will help us learn to read and write. Play syllable games where the child challenges the adult to determine the number of syllables in words she picks.

 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/.