North Carolina Early Learning and Development Progressions: Birth to Five

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

Subdomain: Learning to Communicate

Goal: Children understand communications from others.

Skill Progression: Understand communication from others

Age: 54-60 Months

Click here to go to all skills for ages 54-60 Months.

Understands terms related to a broad range of topics, including environmental features, math and science topics, community components, cultural differences, current events, etc.

Situations for Observation of Skill

Read a story about a different culture. Listen to the child’s comments and questions about the book.

Elicitation Strategy

Read the story aloud to the children. Stop and point out aspects of the culture in the pictures on each page. Ask questions to elicit children’s thinking. For example, in the story Stone Soup (Chinese culture version), point out the Great Wall and ask children to guess how long it is, how many stones are in it? Look at the different dress and occupations of the people. How are these alike or different from our dress and our parents’ jobs? What foods do they eat that are the same or different? Etc.

Behavior Observed

The child demonstrates understanding of aspects of nature, communities, life style, and cultural differences.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

Encourage early childhood educators and parents to share a wide variety of topics through story books and expository books to expand children’s exposure to and knowledge of various topics. Young children can be introduced to other cultures, customs, foods, geography and so on through books, movies, and magazines. They become interested in learning more about people, the world, space, science, and so on when adults spark their interest through discussion, questioning, and investigation.

 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/.