0–9 months – See this age across all domains Infants

What educators might observe

• Listens, attends to, and reacts to speech sounds in the environment
• Babbles and makes sounds exploring different ways to vocalize (e.g., “ba-ba” and “eee”)
• Imitates sounds heard in familiar spoken language(s)
• Is more attuned to the speech sounds of their home language than those of other languages
• Reacts differently to an unfamiliar sound by gazing or attempting to recreate sound

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Create sounds rooted in playful interactions with the child; show a photo of an animal or an object from a book and make the appropriate sound (“cluck, cluck,” “pio, pio,” or “choo choo,” for example)
• When a sound is heard, mimic and identify it, overemphasizing the phonemes
• Recreate sounds and vocalizations playfully
• Include books, rhymes, and songs in the environment

8–16 months – See this age across all domains Infants

What educators might observe

• Produces lengthy consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel babbles (e.g., a-ga-a-ga a-ga)
• Makes animal sounds from their home language
• Changes tone when babbling so that their babbles sound more like the speech sounds of their home language
• Demonstrates understanding that a word is a combination of sounds by creating own words to represent something (e.g., calls their brother “Buba”)

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Sing familiar songs and change the lyrics (“The horn on the bus goes beep beep beep; the dogs on the bus go ruff, ruff, ruff”)
• Sing and chant nursery rhymes
  • This Little Piggy Went to Market
  • Open Shut Them
  • The Itsy Bitsy Spider
  • Down, Down Baby
  • Mr. Foster Came from Gloucester

15–24 months – See this age across all domains Toddlers

What educators might observe

• Speech shows their ability to use a variety of sounds and syllables from their home language
• Imitates sounds of adult speech to quickly learn new words
• Attends to, repeats, and uses a few words from culturally and linguistically familiar rhymes, phrases, or refrains from stories or songs
• Laughs when adult makes up rhymes containing nonsense words

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Repeat books and stories over and over with enthusiastic rhythmic intonations (e.g., Please Baby Please, by Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee)
• Talk about animal sounds and sounds in the environment by using descriptive words (“The bus made a very loud sound when it stopped!”)

24–36 months – See this age across all domains Toddlers

What educators might observe

• Imitates substitution of the first sound in a word to rhyme (e.g., substitutes the initial sound of the name of friends to play a rhyming game or sing “Willaby Wallaby Woo.”)
• Plays with sounds of words in context, and makes silly substitutions

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Draw focus to words with similar endings (e.g., Oh, yes, you have a nose, and the nose smells the rose!”)
• Read stories with short sentences that emphasize rhyming sounds (e.g., B rown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See? by Eric Carle)

3-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe

• Repeats simple familiar rhymes or sings favorite songs
• Shows enjoyment of rhyme and alliteration (e.g., sings to themself, “Mee, gee, fee, tee”)
• Participates in a read-aloud with a rhyming pattern, filling in the missing rhyming word

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Incorporate finger plays and interactive stories into everyday meetings (e.g., Here is the Beehive; 5 Little Ducks )
• Make felt board characters for favorite rhymes that children can interact with outside of circle time
• Encourage children to “fill in the blank” with rhyming words by using stories and pictures

4-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe

• Demonstrates rhyme recognition, such as identifying which words rhyme from a group of three like hat, log, and cat
• Recognizes phonemic changes in words, such as noticing the change in “Old Mc- Donald had a charm”
• Provides a rhyming word such as “clay!” when given the clue “I’m thinking of something like play dough that we have out at the art area that rhymes with play.”
• Notices and identifies words that start with the same sound

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Include rhyming books and songs in the environment to encourage phonological awareness
  • The Very Hungry Caterpillar , by Eric Carle
  • Chicka Chicka Boom Boom , by Bill Martin Jr
  • I Ain’t Gonna Paint No Mor e, by Karen Beaumont
  • Mama Llama Red P ajama , by Anna Dewdney
  • There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly , by Pam Adams
  • “Juanito Cuando Baila”
• Include alphabet books in the learning environment
  • Alphabet City , by Stephen T Johnson
  • Chicka Chicka Boom Boom , by Bill Martin Jr
  • I Spy An Alphabet in Art , by Lucy Micklethwait
  • Eating the Alphabet , by Lois Ehlert
  • Alligators All Around , by Maurice Sendak
  • On Market Street , by Arnold Lobel

5-year-olds – See this age across all domains Preschool

What educators might observe

• Demonstrates awareness that spoken language is composed of smaller sound segments (e.g., labels a drawing using initial sounds)
• Shows word awareness by isolating a single word from a sentence
• Produces one or more words that rhyme with another word (e.g., “What rhymes with log?”)
• Provides a word that fits with a group of words sharing an initial sound (e.g., “Sock, Sara, and Song all start with the /s/ sound. What else starts with the /s/ sound?”)
• Produces the sounds made by many letters
• Uses initial and some final sounds in invented spelling (e.g. writes, “IATK” For “I ate cake”)
• Emergent multilingual children show awareness of sounds from home language(s)

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Sing songs and recite poems and rhymes, such as “BINGO,” and “I Like to Eat Apples and Bananas”
• During read-aloud and other small and large group discussions examine words for sounds and letters that represent them; do this for words that are meaningful to children, such as letters/sounds of their names
• Introduce longer songs that rhyme, which allow children to make up their own rhymes (e.g., sing “Down By The Bay” and incorporate lines like: “ Have you ever seen a fish making a wish? ”)
• Point out sound-letter correspondences, especially in high-interest words and/or children’s names
• Encourage children to label objects in their drawings with initial letters
• T each word-learning strategies such as making connections to home languages

6-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

What educators might observe

• Generates a group of rhyming words from one word
• Segments simple words into their initial, middle, and ending sounds
• Taps out the number of syllables in a multisyllabic word
• Changes the middle sound of a short word to make a new word (e.g., changes dog to dig by substituting the “i” sound for the “o” sound”)
• Uses first, last, and some middle sounds in invented spelling (e.g., writes, I WNT TO THE PRK for “I went to the park.”)
• Begins to explore and identify blends such as “pl” in play and “br” in brown

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Explore sounds of the alphabet by playing a clapping game (“When I say a word that starts with an “m,” clap your hands!”)
• Create an activity in which children can listen to beginning and ending sounds, noting the difference between each

7-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

What educators might observe

• Explores and identifies the concept of silent “e” (e.g., adds “e” to “hid” to change the word to “hide” and understands the vowel sound has changed)
• Develops awareness of letters that have more than one sound (e.g., notices the “o” in “row” makes a different sound than the “o” in “dog”)
• Incorporates blends, digraphs, prefixes, and suffixes into their invented spelling
• Uses segmenting in order to read larger words by breaking word down into initial sounds or syllables (/fac/ /tor/ /y/ for factory)
• Recognizes the base of a word and common prefixes and suffixes and uses them to make different words (e.g., “trans,” “port,” and “ed” or “ing”)

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Play familiar games with rhymes (hand claps, jump rope chants) invite a family member to come in to introduce the game
• Introduce a book such as Adivinanzas in Mixteco (Riddles in Mixteco) that is written or translated into several different languages and language varieties; ask families about riddles in their home languages
• Explore vowel sounds by singing songs in a variety of languages (e.g., “Juanito Cuando Baila”)

8-year-olds – See this age across all domains Early elementary

What educators might observe

• Asks about rhymes in languages other than their own (e.g., “What rhymes with Estrella?”)
• Repeats sophisticated tongue twisters, such as “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,”

Ways educators might support the child's development

• Invite children to compose a song for a friend by changing the lyrics of a favorite song to personalize it
• Play a familiar card game, and replace cards with images and words that match; for example, children can play “Go Fish” and ask for a word that rhymes with the card they have
• Invite students to create their own rhyming poems, songs, or haikus