What Your Child Should Know by Age 5

At age 5, your child’s sense of independence will skyrocket. Accompanying that growing independence is a sponge-like eagerness for facts about the world around them. Meanwhile, your child’s internal landscape is still ripe with imagination. This combination yields a powerful time for exploration and creativity. Prepare to watch them delight and surprise you on a daily basis.

Reading Development:

• Enjoys being read to and pretends to read aloud from a book 
• Can produce rhymes
• Knows most letters and can match some letters to the sounds they make
• Can match some written and spoken words
• Can write some letters and numbers
• Likes to retell simple stories and asks questions about books

Language Development:

• Uses more description in conversations  
• Sentences are sometimes six words or longer, with combined phrases 
• Knows the name for most common objects 
• Can count to 10 and knows basic colors 
• May tell riddles and jokes (and will definitely find them funny!) 
• Understands opposites, such as big and little or up and down (and yes and no, of course!) 

Physical Development:

• Can swing by himself
• Can bounce and catch a ball
• Can build a tower with blocks (and can knock them down again!)
• Can hop on one foot and may skip
• Can draw simple a simple stick figure or face

Emotional Development:

• Can take turns and share (but doesn’t always want to!) 
• Prefers to play in smaller groups and may try to exclude others
• Wants to feel grown up and can feel proud or embarrassed easily
• Has a beginning sense of right and wrong
• Can organize pretend play and invent games with other children