Contents

Learning and development 4 to 5 years

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

I will need help to understand; and learn how to manage my emotions. I want to feel positive about myself and develop my self-confidence. I will learn about my body and work out how to manage my personal needs, all by myself. I need help to make and learn about healthy choices. I would like lots of friends and learn skills so I can play and work with others harmoniously.

Building Relationships: Help me learn how to form relationships with others

  • Encourage me to share and cooperate with friends and other peers

Managing Self: Help me to be healthy, feel good and learn about myself

  • Let me tell you how you can help me when I’m making something
  • Give me lots of praise when I learn and new skill, or when I am helpful
  • Make fruit kebabs or vegetable faces to help me try different types of fruit and vegetables

Self-Regulation: Learning and feeling emotions

  • Talk to me about how to keep safe when we’re going to cross the road at a pelican crossing or zebra crossing
  • Help me to express how I feel using words
  • Can you help me solve problems by talking about them with me, it will help me to overcome tricky situations

Physical Development

Help me to be happy, healthy and active. I need you to support me to develop my muscles and learn through my senses, so I am strong and able to balance and co-ordinate my body. I need to play indoors and outdoors so I can use all my muscles. Later on, my fine motor control will become more skilled so I can be more precise and develop my hand-eye co-ordination to help with my writing when I get to school.

Big and little skills to develop muscles and body control

  • Can you plan time and space so I can be really active and out of breath on a daily basis?
  • Let me know how I can use my whole body to move around, slithering on my tummy, crawling on all fours. I love the challenge of monkey bars or trying to climb up some rope, which will make me strong
  • Can I help you to peel and chop some fruit and veg? This will help me with my writing skills when I go to school

Communication and Language

Help me to develop my speaking (my home language or signing is important too) as this is important for all areas of learning and in later life. I will be talking lots and lots and will enjoy interesting conversations. I will love learning new words, learning rhymes and songs and I will really benefit from you reading stories to me regularly, so I hear and learn lots of new words.

Listening, attention and understanding

  • Play a treasure hunt game with me where I have to listen to your instructions to help me find the next “clue”
  • When we’re sharing a story together ask me why I think something has happened or what might happen next

Speaking

  • When we’re sharing a story ask me how I think the story might end
  • Use different voices, like loud voices or squeaky voices, when we’re telling stories
  • Have a look at the communication checker to see if I’m on track
  • Make up silly rhymes with me where we use words that begin with the same letter or the words all rhyme, like “cat”, “bat” and “hat”
  • Play “I spy” with me

Literacy

Can you help me develop a life-long love of reading? I need to be able to develop my understanding of language and develop my skills for word reading. It really helps me when we look at stories and non-fiction books, read together and enjoy rhymes, poems and songs. Can you start to introduce ideas to help me develop word reading? (See the ideas in the table). If I can organise my ideas when speaking, this will help me learning to write.

Understanding and Comprehension

  • I really enjoy looking at books with you, keep reading to me or just talk about the pictures every day
  • Make a puppet theatre with me from a cardboard box and puppets, cut out of comics or pictures from websites, to help me make up new stories
  • I have favourite books – ask me about them. Can we find any words that rhyme and add other rhyming words? “Rebecca drives a double decker”
  • Can we make up stories? If you write them down, we could act them out

Word Reading

  • Let me ‘read’ to you and ask me interesting questions about the story
  • Make and play games with me that use letters or words
  • Play games where you give me an instruction like “Can you j-um-p?” or “Can you h-o-p?” and I have to put the sounds of the word together and show you the action

Writing

  • Make a pretend shop with me and let me write the price lists. We can write a shopping list too
  • Make number plates with me for my cars
  • Make a photo book of our family or when we went to the park and let me write my own words in it

Mathematics

To support my mathematical skills, I need opportunities to practise counting confidently. I need to understand the quantity of each number and the patterns within those numbers. I can use lots of objects to help me understand quantity - small pebbles, cars, raisins, small bricks, they all help me to organise my counting and explore number patterns (1+4 is also the same as 3+2). Can you provide opportunities for me to develop my spatial reasoning skills? Exploring lots of shapes and how they fit together, patterns and positions; and using mathematical language, helps me to learn spatial awareness.

Number

  • Plan a picnic with me and let me decide how many sandwiches and bananas we will need
  • Make a number line with me using different numbered birthday cards
  • Play number snap or bingo with numbers that we’ve cut out of a magazine
  • Sing number songs where I have to count backwards like “Five Little Ducks” or “Ten Fat Sausages”

Numerical Patterns

  • Let me sort out the pairs of shoes so that they go from small to big or big to small
  • Let me make patterns with buttons or lids, like “big, small, big, small”, or using colouring pens we can make colour patterns, “red circle, yellow circle, red circle…”
  • Let me give you instructions for an obstacle course, like “Go under the blanket”, “Go through the tunnel” and “Go behind the chair”
  • Let’s look for shapes when we’re out, triangular road signs, round wheels, diamond window patterns

Understanding the World

Help me to understand the wider world and my community. Let’s visit parks, libraries and museums to meet important members of society such as police officers, nurses and firefighters. I will learn about the world by looking at a wide variety of stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems that will develop my understanding of our culturally, socially, technologically and ecologically diverse world. All of these experiences will help develop my knowledge and vocabulary which will later support my reading comprehension.

People, Culture and Communities

  • Let me help you find the things we need in the shop
  • Let’s have a pretend party for my dolls and teddies and picnic on the floor or outside
  • We can write a letter/ card and post it together
  • Can you take me to important places and places of worship in the community?

Natural World

  • We could make a simple map to show how we get from our house to the nursery or the library
  • We can draw or take photos of what we see like a bus stop or post box
  • Lets draw a road for my cars or a track for my trains on a big piece of paper
  • Let me help you water the plants
  • Let me help you with cooking
  • Talk to me about the changes to ingredients such as runny, solid, melting

Past and Present

  • Can we look at photos of my family - pictures of gran when she was a baby, you as a child?
  • Let me take photos of my favourite toys, special grown-ups or when we walk to the bus stop
  • We can change the batteries in toys together

Expressive Arts and Design

Can you provide me with regular opportunities to engage with the arts? By doing so, it helps me develop my imagination and creativity as I experience and play with a wide range of media and materials. By exploring arts, culture and theatre, what I see, hear and join in with helps to develop my understanding, self-expression and vocabulary, as well as appreciation of others.

Creating with Materials

  • Let me use my paints to mix up my own colours
  • Wrap up objects/ boxes using paper, scissors, string or sticky tape and have a party
  • Give me string, scissors, sticky tape, glue and boxes to make a model, like a castle or a car
  • Sing and dance with me to my favourite songs

Being Imaginative and Expressive

  • Help me to use some of my toys to make up a story
  • Give me pieces of material to make a cape or a big cardboard box to make a spaceship when I’m pretending to be somebody else or going on an adventure
  • Change the ending of stories or create new ideas
  • Pretend stories with me like “Going on a Bear Hunt” or “Walking Through the Jungle”
  • Let me tell you a story about what I’m doing when I’m dressing up and pretending to be a pirate or a doctor

BBC's Tiny Happy People

Tiny Happy People can provide you with further ideas on how to help your child's brain development so they get the best start in life.

Visit 4 to 5 years old brain development on Tiny Happy People

Access songs and nursery rhymes on Tiny Happy People

Visit the BBC Bitesize website on starting Primary School 

For more information and ideas visit What to Expect When on the Foundation Years website.

For more ideas and resources visit communication, literacy, reading and maths.

BBC TIny Happy People logo