Finishing up the dive into the American Speech and Hearing Association [ASHA] communication milestones, we have language development: 4-5 years old. Some of these concepts require prior knowledge and exposure, in other words, depending on a child’s life experience and cognitive development, they may appear sooner or a little later. This is important to remember, especially when it comes to evaluations, choosing goals for speech therapy, and planning speech therapy sessions.
4 Years Old to 5 Years Old
Between 4 and 5 years old, children are using longer and more complex sentences that are grammatically correct. At this age, children also enjoy making connections with stories, characters, and their own lives. For example, while watching their favorite TV show, a child may notice the main character in the story is eating chocolate chip cookies and say “Hey! I like to eat chocolate chip cookies too!”. Between 4 years old and 5 years old, children begin to tell stories using a main character and setting, use at least one irregular plural form of a word, and location words. They also begin to understand simple time concepts and follow directions to play simple games.
Literacy Skills
By the time they turn 5, children can locate the front of the book and the title. They can also imitate reading and writing from left to right, identify some rhyming words, and may begin blending words together to create compound words [cup and cake to make cupcake]. Additionally, 5-year-olds may also recognize and name 10 letters and write their name.
Playing word games is a fun and easy way to incorporate early literacy development including rhyming words and helping them learn to build compound words.
Disclaimer: While I love the idea of all 5 year-olds knowing their letters and being able to rhyme words by the time they start kindergarten, sometimes I don’t know how realistic it is. Especially for the population we typically see in speech therapy. Honestly, it’s more important they recognize their name than be able to write it.
Speech Development
By 5 years old, children should be producing almost all the consonants correctly and understandable in conversation with most adults and peers.
Early Childhood Speech Therapy
These milestones are important and are great for understanding development. They provide concepts that we can work toward, but we have to keep things in perspective. The children we are seeing in speech therapy may be meeting some of these milestones but not all of them. They may be 4 years old and meeting the milestones of 3 years old. And that’s okay. We can still offer them the tools they need to increase their development and help them communicate effectively.
We just have to find out where they are and meet them there.
