North Carolina Early Learning and Development Progressions: Birth to Five

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

Subdomain: Construction of Knowledge: Thinking and Reasoning

Goal: Children demonstrate the ability to think about their own thinking: reasoning, taking perspectives, and making decisions

Skill Progression: Taking perspectives

Age: 2-4 Months

Click here to go to all skills for ages 2-4 Months.

Tries to imitate adult mouth movements

Situations for Observation of Skill

Watch the child in face-to-face interaction with an adult.

Elicitation Strategy

Ask the adult to make slow, exaggerated mouth movements paired with a sound: open your mouth, stick out your tongue, smile, protrude your lips and wait.

Behavior Observed

After several seconds the child will make mouth movements. Some movements may approximate what the caregiver adult did.

Routines-based Intervention (Embedded Instruction)

Explain to parents that one way the baby will learn to talk is by watching how sounds are made and imitating mouth and tongue movements. Imitation games are motivating to the infant and build basic skills.

 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/.