Your Child’s Development 48-60 Months

Milestones: By 60 months, most children can:

• Button some buttons.
• Hop on one foot.

Body Awareness and Control:

• Your child can balance while standing on one foot for several seconds.
• Your child can walk down steps using alternating feet without holding the railing.
• Your child can balance while walking on the edge of the sandbox.

Muscle Development and Coordination:

• Your child can play games using their new skills, including hopscotch.
• Your child can run and stop with control at a desired spot.
• Your child will have an easier time using various tools, such as eating utensils, crayons, keyboards, paintbrushes, and scissors.
• Your child can build and throw. They enjoy carrying heavy things and building with blocks and other natural materials.

Nutrition:

• Your child knows the name of and will eat a variety of healthy foods.

Basic Safety:

• Your child will act to keep themselves safe by reaching for your hand when they are in a parking lot or looking before crossing a street.

Self-Care:

• Your child can do basic skills like blowing their nose or washing their hands.

Milestones: By 60 months, most children can:

• Your child can tell a story they heard or make up a story with at least two events.
• Your child can answer simple questions about a book after you read it to them.
• Your child can keep a conversation going with more than three back-and-forth exchanges that follow the topic of conversation.
• Your child can rhyme words like bat-cat or ball-tall.

Expressive Communication/Expressive Language:

• Your child can speak clearly enough to be understood by people not in their family.
• Your child can ask questions about what others are saying.
• Your child can tell you stories with multiple characters and events.
• Your child can participate in extended conversations with others, responding appropriately and staying on topic most of the time.
• Your child may experiment with “potty” language and say words they know they are not allowed to say.

Receptive Communication/Receptive Language:

• During conversations, your child can understand gestures, facial expressions, and body language.
• Your child can listen and understand stories, directions, and conversations.
• Your child can follow instructions that include a two—or three-step sequence of actions, such as setting up a game.

Emergent Reading:

• Your child can make connections between a book or story and personal experiences.
• Using pictures as a guide, your child can guess what will happen next in a story.
• Your child may have favorite books, authors, or illustrators.
• Your child may request or respond to informational books on favorite topics.
• Your child may recognize specific words, including their name.

Emergent writing

• Your child can recognize some letters in the alphabet, especially those in their own name, and can copy or write them.
• Your child may be able to write their name
• Your child can copy words if you write them first.
• Your child may draw letter-like symbols to make letters or words
• Your child may start writing some letters. They might be big and take up the whole page. They might be backward and upside down.

Milestones: By 60 months, most children:

• Are ready to learn to apply math concepts such as numbers, shapes, and sizes when tackling problems.
• Use all their senses to gather information, notice differences and similarities, and often make comparisons.

Inquiry and Exploration:

• Children observe, wonder, and/or ask questions, make guesses, etc. For example, while digging in the mud, a child might see a worm and wonder, “Does it live in the ground? I see another one. Is it their home?”
• Children are using senses and tools/technology to aid in investigation. For example, while sorting different rocks, a child might pick up one of the rocks and wash it with soap and water. Then, he might get the magnifying glass to observe it more closely.
• Children continue experimenting with cause and effect and may repeat actions to make something happen. For example, a child notices that another child buttons her own coat, so he tries several methods before succeeding in buttoning their coat.

Reasoning and Problem Solving:

• Children are figuring out multiple solutions to problems if the first one doesn’t work. For example, if a child is trying to get a ball down from the tree, they first throw a shoe to get it down and, when that doesn’t work, get a rake to try to poke it down.
• Children may talk about their own ideas, predictions, and plans, building on prior experiences. This can be self-initiated or guided by adults.
• Children are working with others to plan or problem-solve toward a shared goal and can describe the reasons for their decisions. Example: Three children work together to make a complex track for a train and discuss how sharp curves might make a train come off the tracks.

Play

• Children may engage in pretend play with others to explore and understand life experiences and roles. An example of this is children playing “house,” “doctors,” or “police and bad guys.”
• They may begin to understand simple jokes.
• They may tell elaborate stories they’ve invented or add details to stories.

Executive Function:

• If their initial idea or plan doesn’t work, a child may be able to change those plans to get a different result.
• Children are beginning to stay focused for longer periods on activities that interest them and may return to those activities.
• They demonstrate a desire to please adults and may seek adult attention. For example, a child yells, “Watch me! Watch me!” as they walk across a balance beam.

Tips to support cognitive growth:

• Using open-ended materials like blocks, cars, shells, stones, toy animals, and cardboard boxes allows your child to use their imagination and creativity during play. These materials don’t have a set purpose, so your child can explore and invent new ways to use them, which helps develop problem-solving skills and cognitive abilities.
• Involving your child in household tasks like cooking, setting the table, sorting laundry, and gardening offers practical learning experiences. These activities teach responsibility, fine motor skills, and basic life skills. Additionally, asking your child to solve problems during these tasks encourages critical thinking and decision-making, essential for their overall development.
  • “How does the soup smell? What does it feel like when you taste it?”
  • “Can you find any other crunchy foods like this broccoli?”
  • “We are having company tonight: Grandma, Poppy, and Uncle Stu. How many plates, forks, glasses, and napkins do we need on the table to have a place for each of us?”
  • “Where do you think the water goes after it goes down the drain?”
  • “What do you notice about the sand when you dig deeper?”

Milestones: By 60 months, most children:

• Identify by sight how many are in a small group of up to 3 items.
• Begin to recognize and attempt to write numerals up to 10.
• Use words to show understanding of the order and position of objects (before, under, after, first, last, etc.)
• Identify and name common shapes.
• Compare the shape of two objects (for example, a child draws two round shapes and points out that one is an oval and one is a circle).
• Makes comparisons such as bigger or smaller.
• Recognize that time is measured in units (for example, a child asked how many more minutes he can stay outside)
• Begins creating simple patterns with familiar objects (for example, a child places the cubes in order of blue, orange, blue, orange).
• Sort objects and count and compare the groups formed (for example, a child says there are three brown bears and four black bears).
• Begin to differentiate between yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Tips to support cognitive growth:

• Count out loud whenever you can
• Point to things as you count them so that children can see how each number you say represents one object
• When shopping, ask your child things like: “Should we get four apples or five apples? Can you count them for me as we put them in the bag?”
• When getting ready for dinner, ask your child things like: “Can you get the plates to put on the table? How many people are eating? How many plates will you need?”
• Ask your child to guess or predict how many things there are and then count them together. For example, “How many strawberries do you think are in this basket?”
• You can start asking your child simple questions about adding or subtracting. For example, “If you have five cookies and you eat two, how many will you have left?” These games can be done with actual objects so that your child can see the things. Once they are confident with these problems using objects, you can ask questions without them.
• You can invite your child to ask you number questions.
• Children will make lots of mistakes when they are learning about numbers. Without saying that they are “wrong,” you can gently suggest that we count again together. Or you can say something like, “You counted five ducks, and I only see four.”