Early Childhood Indicators of Progress

Language and Literacy Development

This domain involves children’s feelings about themselves, as well as their interactions and relationships with peers and adults. Included in this focus are indicators that refer to children’s views of themselves as learners and their sense of responsibility to themselves and others. Particularly important in this domain are the skills children demonstrate making friends, solving conflicts, and functioning effectively in groups.

Strategies community members and policymakers can use to promote development in children's language and literacy development.

Children Show Progress in Listening When They:*

  1. Understand non-verbal and verbal cues
  2. Listen with understanding to stories, directions, and conversations
  3. Follow directions that involve a two or three-step sequence of actions
  4. Listen to and recognize different sounds in rhymes and familiar words

Strategies family members and teachers and caregivers can use to facilitate children's curiosity.

Children Show Progress in Speaking When They:*

  1. Communicate needs, wants, or thoughts through non-verbal gestures, actions, expressions, and/or words
  2. Communicate information using home language and/or English
  3. Speak clearly enough to be understood in home language
    and/or English
  4. Use language for a variety of purposes
  5. Use increasingly complex and varied vocabulary and language
  6. Initiate, ask questions, and respond in conversation with others

Strategies family members and teachers and caregivers can use to facilitate children's risk taking.

Children Show Progress in Emergent Reading When They:*

  1. Initiate stories and respond to stories told or read aloud
  2. Represent stories told or read aloud through various media or during play
  3. Guess what will happen next in a story using pictures as a guide
  4. Retell information from a story
  5. Show beginning understanding of concepts about print
  6. Recognize and name some letters of the alphabet, especially those in own name
  7. Begin to associate sounds with words or letters

Strategies family members and teachers and caregivers can use to facilitate children's risk taking.

Children Show Progress in Emergent Writing When They:*

  1. Understand that writing is a way of communicating
  2. Use scribbles, shapes, pictures, or dictation to represent thoughts or ideas
  3. Engage in writing using letter-like symbols to make letters or words
  4. Begin to copy or write own name

Strategies family members and teachers and caregivers can use to facilitate children's persistence.

* These indicators apply to children in the preschool period of ages three to five. They are based on expectations for children approximately four years of age.