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Cozy up with describing!

March 01, 2021

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Winter is still in swing, and we are having lots of fun with sentence structures (syntax) and describing skills.  Children learn to make sentence structures by listening, imitating, and reading sentences in stories, games, and discussions.  A child’s sentence length should be close to their age in years (i.e. 3 years: an average of 3 words), reaching sentence lengths averaging 8 words or more eventually.

When learning to describe, children learn through discussing attributes (i.e. category, appearance, parts, sounds, location, composition) of a given item.  Try describing items in two different learning tasks to challenge kids.  First ask them to tell you all they know (attributes) about an item, then reverse the question, asking them to name an item based upon provided attributes.  This activity facilitates divergent (expanding) and convergent (converging) thinking skills. These skills are great for developing problem-solving and language organization skills needed for math and science.  Take some time to sit down and enjoy a fun describing discussion with your child.  Stay warm!