Kindergarten - Development of 5 & 6 Year-Olds

• 
  Still developing left-to-right visual tracking essential for reading fluency; may focus on one word at a time and read haltingly finding the first word in the next line can sometimes be difficult and they often need to use a pointer or finger to keep their place
• Reverse letters and numbers, either swapping positions, as writing "ot" for "to," or drawing the letters themselves backward so that a "d" looks like a "b"; to help children become more self-aware, teachers can ask about the letter they reversed but not ask them to correct the reversal
• Find it hard to space letters, numbers, and words; using a finger as a separator helps
• Visual focus is on objects close at hand; still have difficulty copying from the board
• Need lots of physical activity; love indoor and outdoor physical play and activity, including lively games.
• Better control of running, jumping, and other large movements
• Staying focused in structured physical education classes can be difficult
• Often fall or slip out of chairs sideways
• Usually pace themselves well; will generally rest before they're exhausted
• May prefer to work standing up; some schools are now providing some stand-up desk spaces
• Still awkward with writing, handcrafts, and tasks requiring small movements
• Hold pencils with a three-fingered, pincer-like grasp; may need a pencil grip to help them relax
• Ready to begin learning manuscript printing; not always able to stay within lines

• 
  Young fives depend on adult authority and want adult approval; they like to help, cooperate, follow rules, and be "good"; love having jobs to do in the classroom
• Older fives may challenge adult authority and seem oppositional at times
• Want verbal permission from adults; can pace themselves while doing a given task but may need to be released to move from task to task; before acting, will ask "Can l...?"
• Need consistent routines, rules, and discipline; respond well to clear and simple expectations, such as "I will always ring the chime just once, which means put down what's in your hands and look at me"
• Can sit and work at quiet activities for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time, particularly tasks with manipulatives such as pretend or real money, counting cubes, attribute blocks, and other concrete objects

• 
  Use and interpret words in their literal or most basic sense; unable to think abstractly; "We're late - we've got to fly!" means "We've got to take to the air like birds!"
• Younger fives express themselves in few words; "play" and "good" are favorites
• More complex in their imaginative expression than fours; like to express themselves through words, drawing, and drama
• Often read aloud even when asked to read silently
• Older fives like to explain things and have things explained to them; will often give elaborate answers to questions

• 
  Have a developing sense of time; don't clearly know what "five minutes" or "in a little while" means; respond well to use of a sand timer where they can see time passing
• Often see only one way to do things; rarely see things from another's viewpoint
• Not ready to understand abstract concepts such as "fairness"; the teacher will have to provide lots of examples as the year progresses: "Each one of you gets the help you need to learn new things - this is how I will be fair to everyone in our classroom"
• Imagination can be vivid, which can lead to believing toys and other objects are actually alive
• Learn best and express thoughts through active play, repetition, copying, and hands-on exploration of materials such as manipulatives, clay, sand, and water
• Think intuitively rather than logically; for example, "It's windy when the trees shake, so the trees must make the wind"
• Like to copy and repeat stories, poems, songs, and games, sometimes with minor variations; enjoy sets of similar math and science tasks
• Can become stuck in repetitive behavior (for example, always drawing rainbows or flowers) for fear of making mistakes when trying something new
• May still "talk their thoughts" out loud; for example, saying "I'm going to move the truck!" before doing so (more typical at four)
• Do best learning with predictable daily schedules reviewed each morning and carried out with a minimum of transitions; need clear routines for these transitions; as much as possible make sure the key events in the day, such as snack, art, and closings circle, happen in the same place, and at the same time

Reading - Provide opportunities for children this age to:

• Vocalize while they read or read out loud quietly to themselves, rather than being expected to do sustained silent reading
• Do "partner" reading - peers helping each other through familiar books; both need to play an active role (as in "parallel" reading)
• Have short chapter books read to them sometimes by readers from older classrooms
• Write stories or reports with a partner or small group of classmates and turn them into books for the classroom library
• Strengthen their reading skills by reading predictable books (books with few words, much repetition, and many pictures)
• Engage in regular systematic and targeted phonics instruction
• Create labels, signs, posters, and charts identifying familiar objects in their environment, such as areas of the room, use of shells, etc.

Writing - Expect from children this age:

• Writing: Labeling of drawings with initial consonants or vowels to stand for one feature in the drawing (as in "H" for "house" in a drawing of houses, people, and trees); tell stories in a single drawing and one or two words
• Beginning Spelling: Largely pre-phonemic or early phonemic -- beginning to use initial consonants or vowels to represent words and sometimes stringing those initial letters together in "sentences" such as I STBFL (I see the butterfly)
• Writing Themes: Family, family trips, fairy tales, tales of good and evil, stories about pets, and stories about themselves and best friends
• Handwriting: Switch to a three-fingered pencil grasp; tendency to write only uppercase letters; as an understanding of spelling develops, use of irregular spacing between words

Across The Curriculum - Provide opportunities for children this age to:

• Take risks and try new things through teacher structured daily challenges, such as drawing a forest without flowers or drawing a rainbow vertically on the page; ask them for ideas as well.
• Take part in active structured playground games in PE, at recess, or in the regular classroom.
• Practice making controlled small movements through simple activities such as weaving, tying shoes, and tracing mazes.
• Learn and practice language skills through teacher modeling, directed role-play, and dramatic play. 
• View and draw simple three-dimensional blocks or shapes from different sitting positions to help them see things from different points of view.

• 
  More aware of their fingers as tools; can use their fingers to count on, trace a maze, maneuver electronic devices, balance a scale, pour exact amounts
• Noisy, sloppy, and in a hurry; fingers are sometimes clumsy and tasks need slowing down or repeated practice to achieve  desired results
• May fall backward out of their chairs at this age rather than sideways as at 5
• Children at this age are teething, so they often chew on pencils, fingernails, hair, books, and other objects
• Work in spurts and will tire easily
• Enjoy being active, both inside and outdoors
• Good visual tracking from left to right and back to the beginning of the next line is normative as sixes begin to read
• Some will still have difficulty copying from board or chart; provide handouts for students to copy from at their desks
• When writing, find spacing and staying on the line difficult because they are more interested in process than product
• Often more comfortable standing up to work, even at their desks

• 
  Ambitious; may choose projects that are too hard
• Proud of their accomplishments and highly competitive
• Sometimes "poor sports" or dishonest; may invent new rules so they can win; cooperative challenge activities take the edge off their fierce need to win individually
• Anxious to do well; extremely sensitive; severe criticism can truly be traumatic
• Tremendous capacity for enjoyment
• Can be bossy, teasing, or critical of others; bossy behavior is sometimes related to competition for friendships
• Tend to complain frequently and use tantrums, teasing, bossing, complaining, and reporting on classmates to try out relationships with authority; need adult understanding but also clear boundaries and limits for acceptable behavior; it can be helpful to read books about teasing, etc. 
• Care a great deal about friends; may have a best friend
• Sometimes more influenced by happenings at school than at home
• Enjoy working and playing in groups; engage in more elaborate cooperative and dramatic play than at 5
• Like doing things for themselves; ready to try taking on individual and group responsibility

• 
  Enjoy explaining things and sharing about things they like; partner sharing can serve as a helpful rehearsal before sharing with the class
• Use boisterous and enthusiastic language
• Love jokes and guessing games that the whole class can engage in; a fun activity is trying to guess a number by asking questions and explaining how they "got" the number before saying the answer

• 
  Very curious; love discovery, new ideas, and asking questions
• Better understanding of past and present, long ago and far away; can begin to understand real history markers
• Very motivated to learn; enjoy the process more than the product; beginning to value skill and technique for their own sake
• Love to color, paint, read, and write; experience an artistic explosion; learn the most when teachers value their efforts and encourage risk-taking
• Comfortable with a busy level of noise and activity
• Enjoy and learn from games, poems, riddles, and songs
• Proudly produce a great quantity of work but are unconcerned with quality; can produce products of higher quality when encouraged to work more slowly or when teachers limit the number of complexity of tasks
• Enjoy and learn from field trips followed by opportunities to tell about trips or use blocks to recreate things they saw

Reading - Provide opportunities for children this age to:

• 
  Continue partner reading
• Continue targeted phonics learning 
• Continue reading decodable texts and predictable texts while beginning to move on to easy chapter books
• Use writing, drawing, clay, painting, drama, or blocks to show their thoughts and feelings about a story
• Show their understanding of differences between genres (for example poetry versus a report; fiction versus nonfiction)

Writing - Expect from children this age:

• Writing: Story development still strongly influenced by drawing, for example, stories based on a collection of drawings; writing whole sentences that are early phonemic or use "letter name" spelling strategies -- "I WNT TO HR HS" for "I went to her house"
• Beginning Spelling: Letter naming and "transitional" spelling ("My frends ride bikes"); emerging sense of phonetic clues
• Writing Themes: Best friends, school-related stories, family, pets, going on trips, new possessions, holidays, fantasy
• Handwriting: Proper grasp of pencil; letters the same size or slightly larger than at five and more sloppily written because children are rushing and experimenting with new letter formation; spontaneous mixing of uppercase and lowercase letters; unpredictable spacing

Across the Curriculum - Provide opportunities for children this age to:

• Take short wiggle breaks throughout the day
• Have a range of choices with different degrees of difficulty for working on classroom projects and representing learning
• Enjoy surprises and treats, including learning new games, inventing new characters, drawing treasure maps
• Use new tools such as magnifying glasses or field journals to draw in
• Make and use maps of the classroom, their room at home, or their route from home to school
• Practice newly learned techniques; for example, to help them understand how scientists observe and measure growth over time, they might draw pictures of a seed they plant in the classroom and draw its growth each day
• experiment with clay, paint, dancing, coloring, bookmaking, weaving, singing, and other arts