By the age of 6, most children have the following skills:
Receptive Language:
Understand complex instructions
Expressive Language:
Use long sentences with complex language & minimal grammatical errors
Sounds that are correctly produced:
Most sounds are correctly produced. There may be some errors with ‘th’ and some consonant blends e.g. ‘br’
Literacy:
- Able to generate a story with narrative elements (who, where, when, what)
- Story sequence begins to show that one action may cause the next with a limited plan to the overall story
- Break simple words into their sounds
- Put sounds together to make a word (e.g. d-o-g = “dog”)
- Identify the beginning, middle and end sounds in words
- Write some simple words
Cause for concern:
- Difficult to understand
- Unable to break words into sounds
- Unable to put sounds together to make a word (e.g. can’t answer “what word does c-a-t make?”)
- Finds it difficult to tell a story or recount events that happened in the past
- Finds it difficult to follow instructions at school (may be being mislabelled as “naughty” or non-compliant)