There are countless situations throughout the school day when your little one needs to use their very best speech and language skills to communicate with other children and with staff.
Let me give you an example, how will they let staff know when they need the toilet? How will your child communicate that they are thirsty? Or upset? On the other side of things, will the staff understand when your child is sad and needs reassurance? Parents often only need to glance at their child to know exactly what they need – it is not always as clear to those getting to know them for the first time.
But, don’t worry! – I’ve got you covered. In this blog, I will discuss five key stages of communication alongside information about how typically developing four-year-old should present and then give some tips on how to develop their skills. Remember, though, this is a guideline, not a definitive checklist. If your child is a little bit behind in some areas I will give you some actionable suggestions of how to support them.
We all know that our little darlings can appear to develop selective listening from time to time, regardless of their age. Hey… I’m not apologising for the several times I have switched off during in-depth explanations of the offside rule. The question is, what levels of attention do our children need to be at when they begin school?
According to research conducted by Cooper, Moodley and Reynell (1978) a child of four years of age should be moving from “single channelled attention” to more “integrated attention”. This means they should be able to listen to verbal instructions whilst continuing to partake in an activity. Children also begin to develop their ability to listen to an instruction without needing to look at the speaker. Automated video transcription may be a great help in the classroom as well.
By school age a child should be able to follow adult directed games and requests and remain at an activity for at least ten minutes.
Here’s a couple of reasons:
“Attention skills are the foundation of language learning. If a child is unable to attend to vocabulary then they will have difficulties understanding it and ultimately difficulties using it correctly”
Of course, friendship fall-outs and break-ups are a right of passage for most children throughout their school experience. However, it is important our children have the correct set of social tools to begin with in order to cope with these social scenarios and ultimately become successful communicators.
So here it is, by the time a child begins school they should have consistent eye contact. They should have a good understanding of non-verbal communication e.g facial expressions and tone of voice and how they link to emotions.
“School starters should be able to initiate conversations with peers and adults and begin to accept the needs of others; taking into account what others say”
Many children show a good understanding of conversational rules such as:
As a parent, it can often seem that your child’s understanding is “fine”. They follow the majority of your instructions without an issue. But let’s dig a little deeper….
Children are intelligent, resourceful creatures and they pick up on every hand gesture, finger point and direction of eye gaze. What I mean by this is that often when we give children instructions or ask questions we subconsciously provide them with non-verbal cues. In other words, they don’t need to understand the words we are saying….clever!! Of course there’s nothing wrong with using gestures when we speak, however we need to ensure that our children can follow the expected level of verbal understanding without help from us.
According to the charity iCan, by the time a child begins school he should be able to understand simple “who” “what” and “where” questions. They should also have a vocabulary knowledge in the thousands!
As a very general rule I would expect the following levels of understanding from a typically developing child between 0-4 years:
In a classroom teachers give instructions all the time. They also introduce new words and ideas almost every day. What can you do to help?
As parents, one of our biggest fears is that our child is unable to make their wants and needs understood. Once they begin full-time education, we won’t be there to help them communicate and translate for them.
According to the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) guidelines set by the UK government, a child starting school should be beginning to use more complex sentences which reflect their growing vocabulary knowledge. By the age of 4 your child should also be connecting their ideas and thoughts using words such as “and” and “because”, for example, “I hurt my knee because I falled over.” School starters should be able to recall a past event and use a range of tenses, however, these may not yet be used accurately.
Confidence in communicating with others can have a large impact on how our children use language, and conversing with unfamiliar adults may be difficult for some children.
When a child enters primary school their speech sounds are still developing so don’t worry too much if their talking isn’t perfect. Let’s have a look at this table. It shows the age at which individual speech sounds develop and which sounds should be firmly in place by school age.
3 years - p b m n t d w k g f h y
4 years - ng s
5 years - l
6 years sh ch j z v r + clusters e.g. br, cr, st etc
By 4 years of age your child should have also stopped using the following speech sound processes which are developmental:
I hope you have found this blog post helpful. As I said at the beginning of the article, every child develops at different rates and show individual strengths and challenges.