Prepositions are typically location words, or words that can help you answer the question "where"
Many children with language disorders have smaller vocabularies than other children their age, and it is important to help try to bridge that gap. When we think about what words we want to teach children, one common vocabulary area to target is prepositions. Prepositions are typically location words, or words that can help you answer the question "where," such as "in, on, under, above, to, from, before, behind, below, between," and "through." Many of these words are in the top 200 most common words used, so you can imagine how important they are for understanding language and talking, as well as learning!
By school-age, your child should have most prepositions. Typically developing three-year-old children can use the words in and on correctly (Hulit & Howard, 2001) and understand under. Children understand next to by 40 months. The prepositions behind, in back of and in front of are understood by four years of age, but they may continue to have difficulty understanding above, below and at the bottom of. Children do not use up, down and off as prepositions until after four years of age (although they may have them in other contexts (e.g., asking to be lifted "up").
The ability to use and understand prepositions hugely impacts a child's ability to:
- follow directions accurately (e.g. "put your books under your desk")
- describe an item based on location (e.g "I saw him behind the curtain")
- respond accurately to 'where' questions (e.g. "Where is the coffee mug? It is in the cupboard- no, not that one- the one beside it!")
Prepositions may be referred to as a "basic concept" or Tier 1 words.
Teaching Strategies
When teaching location words, you will want to start by teaching your child to understand the locations words before moving onto saying them when filling in a sentence (e.g., "he is ________"), . We want to make sure we start off by teaching, not testing. You can do this by saying the word many times in an appropriate context over a short period of time and using gestures and pictures to help give your child additional clues to the meaning of the word. Create play situations where you'll use prepositions repeatedly, read books that talk about locations, create crafts and give directions using prepositions, build Lego and give directions using prepositions (e.g., put the gray piece ON the white piece), and have fun! Working on prepositions does not have to involve a worksheet.
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