Talking 4-5 years
Talking 4-5 years
This is a guide to how children develop talking and their understanding or words between 4 and 5 years.
At this stage, they need to listen, understand more and share their ideas within the classroom. They will use their language skills to help them learn to read.
Children develop skills at different rates but by 5 years usually children will:
- Understand spoken instructions without stopping what they are doing to look at the speaker
- Choose their own friends and play mates
- Take turns in much longer conversations
- Understand more complicated words such as ‘first’, ‘last’, ‘might’, ‘may be’, ‘above’ and ‘in between’
- Understand words that describe sequences such as “first we are going to the shop, next we will play in the park”
- Use sentences that are well formed. However, they may still have some difficulties with grammar. For example, saying 'sheeps' instead of 'sheep' or 'goed' instead of 'went'
- Think more about the meanings of words, such as describing the meaning of simple words or asking what a new word means
- Use most sounds effectively. However, they may have some difficulties with more difficult words such as 'scribble' or 'elephant'.
How to support your child
There are lots of things you can do to encourage your child at this stage:
- Building relationships with your child's pre-school or school is very important. Find out what topics or songs they are learning. This can help you support new words and ideas your child is learning.
- Playing board games that involve taking turns helps them to listen and concentrate for longer.
- Encourage children to talk without being questioned. This can help them to talk more about their experiences. Open questions like 'what are you going to play with today?' encourage children to say more than 'yes' and 'no'. If they find it difficult to answer such open questions, give them choices, such as 'cars or animals?'
- Although children may know lots of different words it is important to introduce new words and phrases. This helps them to continue learning.
- Having fun with words and rhymes can help children learn skills they need for reading and writing
- Children may need time to think before responding to questions and instructions. Give them time without answering for them or finishing their sentences.
Things to look out for
For some children, learning to talk and understand words can be a very difficult process and they may need extra help. By 5 years you may see the following:
- Difficulty with abstract ideas such as size or time.
- Difficulty with complex sentences.
- Not having the right words to be able to say what they want.
- Difficulty organising ideas in order.
- Missing out some words. For example, saying 'playing ball' instead of 'the dog is playing with the ball’.
- Talking about lots of different topics in the same group of sentences.
- Not using the right sounds so that their speech is difficult to understand.
Helpful resources
