Children aged five to seven years
Children aged five to seven years
On this page are strategies devised by speech and language therapists for you to try to help your child aged five to seven years to develop their communication skills. They focus on supporting your child’s understanding, talking and social interaction.
Use the arrow on the right to scroll through the short videos. Then try the ideas shown whilst you go about your everyday routines and while you play with your child. It will be helpful to watch the videos and then choose one or two strategies to try at a time with your child.
Help with understanding
The videos below help you to support your child to develop their understanding of language.
Help with talking
The videos below will support you in helping your child to develop their talking as you go about your everyday activities and play together.
If you have any worries about your child’s understanding or concerns about your child talking, it can be useful to think about their understanding of language and social interaction first.
Help with social interaction
All brains are different. This means that people are ‘neurodiverse’. Some people are neurotypical and some people are neurodivergent. Neurodivergent children and young people will have differences in the way they sense and experience the world and communicate and interact with others. This video explains these differences and what we can do to understand and support them.
If your child is autistic or is under-going/awaiting an autism diagnosis the websites below provide support, resources, and advice.
- AWARE (aware-uk.org) – a parent-run group supporting families with children and young adults on the autistic spectrum (formal diagnosis is not required). The group covers the Airedale, Wharfedale, Bradford and Craven areas and beyond.
- National Autistic Society (autism.org.uk) – offers a range of resources and advice, working to transform lives and change attitudes to help create a society that works for autistic people.
- Ambitious about Autism – a national charity for autistic children and young people, providing information and practical support and delivering specialist education and employment programmes.
- Neurodivergent Education Support and Training (n-est.org)
Help with speech sounds
These videos help you to support your child to develop speech sounds – the sounds we need for talking. Our tongue, lips, teeth, and other parts of our mouth are used to create different speech sounds, which are not the same as letters.
At the age of four to five children develop ‘phonological awareness’. This means they understand that spoken words are made up of sounds and that those sounds come together to form words. The BBC’s Tiny Happy People website has more information about this and how you can use it to help your child’s reading and communication skills.
You may also find these resources useful: