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The child's year between age 5 and age 6 is a key stage in your child´s development, as the focus switches to preparing for school, learning in a more formal environment, and the rules of acceptable behaviour. Subscribe to Type-A Mom articles

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I found this information really useful, as when my older boy hit 6 reading that “fights with siblings are common and will increase in frequency”, “boys will fight more than girls” and that even starting to develop a mean streak was all perfectly normal, really helped me to keep things in perspective!

Movement and mobility

• can run quite fast and is very good at dodging around and changing directions
• can now jump, skip and hop
• can climb ladders and poles, and may now attempt to climb trees
• can jump over small objects ( not quite Superman yet, although most kids think they are!)

Co-ordination

• can draw a wide range of recognizable everyday objects – buildings, vehicles, trees and animals
• enjoys simple written games, like dot to dot, tracing games, copying pictures and “spot the difference”
• can use his knife and fork quite well, still needs help with cutting harder items
• capable of carrying drinks and other items carefully, but still spills things a lot of the time

Vocabulary

• knows over 2000 words by the age of 5 and will continue to learn around 1000 new words per year for the immediate future
• speaks in sentences of around 8 to 10 words, and capable of making quite long speeches about topics that interest
• sentence structure starts to become more complex

Social Skills

• is helpful and caring when in the right mood, but can also be mean at times especially to siblings
• fights with siblings are increasing, and 2 boys will fight more than 2 girls
• will argue with you just to be awkward, even when they know they are in the wrong
• learns to manipulate, cheat and sometimes lie to try and get own way (I guess that this sounds worse than it is, after all they are still life skills we need along the way!)
• does not like to take the blame for anything
• has a sense of what is right and wrong, but there is no guarantee that kids will do the right thing anyway!

Continues to learn by:

• now has an interest in numbers, times and dates
• begins to try and quantify things, and can put things in order eg small to large
• is on a steep learning curve through formal education, and is coping with learning the social skills required for school.

Parent support through this transition is vital, so be patient, talk to your kids and try and help them through the learning process. I´m told it does get easier as they get older. For some reason I´m sceptical..!

In terms of their learning and development, most children pass through roughly the same milestones at approximately the same age.

This series of articles has been written as a rough guide to how you should expect your child to develop between the ages given. Remember, all kids are individuals, and they will vary in their strengths and weaknesses and preferences for each skill set ( and this list is by no means definitive!).

Also see:

• Child Development from Age 4-5
• Child Development from Age 3-4
• Child Development from Age 2-3