How To Promote Your Child’s Grammar
Children should use mature sentence structure by five-years-old. Wow, there are lots of grammar rules to master!
So, here’s a simple road map (based on Brown’s Stages of Syntactic and Morphological Development) to help you promote your child’s grammar once they are producing 2+ word utterances:
Present progressive -ing on verbs – e.g., “walking home”, “eating snack”
Prepositions in and on – e.g., “in box”, “on table”
Plural -s – e.g., “my toys”, “two shoes”
Irregular past tense verbs – e.g., “He went home”, “I saw it”
Possessive ‘s – e.g., “Mom’s car broken”, “cat’s food yucky”
Copula (primary verb) is or are – e.g., “Is it dad?”, “Are they there?”
Articles a and the – e.g., “A puppy outside”, “The puppy nice”
Regular past tense -ed on verbs – e.g., “She jumped high”, “He winked eye”
Third person regular -s – e.g., “He swims slow”, “Mom brings lunch”
Third person irregular – e.g., “She has funny hats”, “He does like TV”
Auxiliary (secondary verb) is or are – e.g., “Are they swimming now?”
During play or routines with your child listen for each grammatical morpheme. As you go down the list you may get to a point where it’s obvious your kiddo needs models and prompts. Now you know where your child may be in the Brown’s Stages and can model lots of the grammar they are not yet using.
