Building sentences – Early Years
Learning to build sentences is an important skill for young children and begins after children learn to link single words together. This takes place alongside their vocabulary development; the two skills are closely interlinked. Children need to know around 50 words before they will be ready to start building sentences – take a look at the vocabulary pages for some ideas.
Young children learn to build sentences by listening to others; often this skill develops rapidly after they have learned to link 2 or 3 words together. They will make lots of mistakes along the way and rely on adults modeling correct sentences and sometimes correcting mistakes in a supportive way appropriate to their age and stage of development.
Once children can speak in sentences, they can use language to make requests, comment, ask and answer questions, and a number of other purposes!
Talking Tips
- Reduce background noise when talking to young children. Create quiet times within the day when children can listen to an adult talking to the group.
- Take turns within small groups to speak in simple sentences.
- Comment on what different children in the group are wearing or how they are feeling
- Do not correct the child’s attempts at language negatively…
- Instead… Model back the correct form e.g. if the child says “I winned”, you say “yes you won”, emphasising the key word.
1-2 years
Building sentences
Children of this age will begin joining 2 words together e.g., more juice, mummy work, eat banana.
Note: A child needs to learn around 50 words before they can start joining words.
Communication Station Video: Let’s get moving – action words
2-3 years
Building Sentences
Children of this age progress to joining 3-4 words together in a sentence. At this age, it is common for children to:
- start to use past tense e.g. kicked, clapped.
- begin to mark possession e.g. girl’s hat, dog’s tail.
- use regular plurals e.g. cats, dogs, socks.
- miss out function words such as ‘the’ and ‘is’.
3-4 years
Building Sentences
Children of this age are producing longer sentences by putting lots of words together and may use joining words such as ‘and’ & ‘because’. They may also:
- use auxiliary verbs (is, was, has) i.e. “the man is eating”
- use determiners e.g. “the man is kicking the ball”.
- increasingly use past tense and 3rd person singular e.g. he drinks, she eats.
- overgeneralise irregular verb endings e.g. “throwed” (instead of ‘threw’).
4-5 years
Building Sentences
Children of this age begin including more grammatical information in their sentences:
- Use the grammatical words (e.g. is, was, has, the, a) i.e. “the man is eating” instead of “man eating”.
- Increased use of verb tenses e.g. he drinks, she eats. S/he may make mistakes such as saying ‘throwed’ instead of ‘threw’, ‘runned’ instead of ‘ran’.
- Uses personal (e.g. he/she/they) and possessive (e.g. his/hers/theirs) pronouns.
Ask lots of questions e.g. Why? What? Where?