In child speech development, most five year olds can:
- Have sentence length of 4-5 words
- Use past tense correctly
- Have a vocabulary of nearly 1,500 words
- Point to colors red, blue, yellow and green
- Identify triangles, circles and squares
- Understand “In the morning”, “next”, “noontime”
- Can speak of imaginary conditions such as “I hope”
- Ask many questions, such as “who?” and “why?”
Parenting Tips for Speech Skills
Suggested play to help a toddler between 4 and 5 years develop its speech skills:
- Plan an excellent adventure. Decide with your child on a new place you want to visit. Read about it if you can, and talk about what you hope to see when you’re there. It might be a park you’ve never been to, or a museum. After you come home, ask questions about what you saw and did.
- What does it feel like? Put a few objects in a bag. Without looking, have your child pick an object and describe it to you. See if your child can guess what it is. Try a screw, a big feather, measuring cup and a cotton ball.
- Look for cloud pictures. Take a blanket outside, lie down and watch the clouds go by. Talk about what you see. “Does that fluffy one look like whip cream?” “Look over there. I see an elephant’s head!”
- End the day on a happy note. Every night when your tuck your toddler in bed, ask “What was the best part about today?” Ask questions to encourage your child to tell you more. Then tell him/her the best moment of your day.
- Give your child an office. Your child watches you do “important tasks” like pay bills, balance the check book, and schedule appointments. So, give your child a mini office where they can do the same. All you need is a calculator, toy phone, note pad, pencils, paper, and envelopes. A computer keyboard is a nice touch. Pretend with them, asking what time he or she will be going to work and then call your child on his or her toy phone.
- Guess the animal. This is fun for the whole family. Cut out some photos of animals from magazines. Turn the pictures upside down and have one person at a time choose a picture. Everyone asks yes or no questions to guess the identity of the animal, like “Does it fly?” When a person correctly guesses the animal, it’s their turn to take a picture and answer the questions.