Speech refers to the way that children pronounce sounds and say words. By 5 years of age, children should be 90% intelligible. They may continue to replace some sounds like ‘r’ with ‘w’ e.g. ‘wed’ for ‘red or ‘th’ with ‘f’ e.g. ‘toof’ for ‘tooth’. By 7-8 years old, they should be making all sounds correctly (except for dialectal variations e.g. in some dialects ‘th’ is always pronounced as ‘f’).
Language refers to how a child is able to put words together to communicate. Children in kindergarten should be using sentences at least 4-5 words long. They should be able to use basic present, past and future tenses. They should be able to follow 3-step directions and use/answer ‘wh’ questions.
Blank’s levels of questions are a good way to gauge how well a kid’s comprehension and higher-order language are developing. By 5, they should be able to answer all 4 levels of questions.
Most children learn to read by 7 years old. However, there are many pre-literacy skills that they develop earlier that are foundational to their literacy development. In kindergarten, child should be able to recognise most letters, the sounds they make and begin to write some letters with correct formation. They should be able to syllabify words, show some familiarity with rhyming and identifying the initial sound of words. They should also have some print awareness i.e. we read from left to right, top to bottom. If any of our kids are not meeting these milestones, this might be something to flag with parents.
Finally, an interesting thing I learned about teaching development. Most of us probably learned to read using a ‘whole language approach’, which basically involves ‘guessing’ the words that are on a page using clues from the pictures. Hence, the unit of learning is ‘words’. However, this approach to learning to read has been discredited. Research has shown that reading requires explicit teaching of sound-letter matches, and it is not a skill that we are innately designed to acquire (as opposed to talking, for example,) which is interesting to think about.
Hope this helps!
Derus Kung
