6-Year-Old Developmental Milestones – Communication and Language
In 2022, our beloved Speech Therapy clinic is turning 6! That means we’ve been providing person-centred Speech Pathology services to the Queensland community for six years, and it’s a pretty big milestone for us.
We also know that turning 6 can be a big milestone for people too! If you’ve got a little one who’s getting ready to move from Prep to Grade 1, you might be curious to know the communication and language milestones they should be reaching by now.
Today, let’s look at the developmental milestones you can expect your child to reach on and within the year of turning 6 years old.
Communication Developmental Milestones for 6-Year-Olds
Communication Developmental Milestones are important for our little ones to reach as these skills lay the foundation for good social relationships. In school, your child will need to be able to positively interact with their teachers and peers to keep up and have fun.
When it comes to communication skills, we expect a typically developing 6-year-old to be capable of:
- Playing cooperatively with 2-3 children for 20 minutes or more
- Apologizing for actions they didn’t intend
- Listening to others while they are speaking
- Paying attention to and following instructions in a group
- Helping others
- Explaining rules of a game to others
- Starting to understand puns and jokes
- Producing the ‘TH’ consonant sound (There, They)
- Being understood by others (who are not family) 90% of the time
- Saying ‘R’ blends like ‘Green’ and ‘Tree’
- Using well-formed sentences
- Taking turns in conversations
- Telling simple stories with a beginning, middle, and end
Language Developmental Milestones for 6-Year-Olds
If you are familiar with Speech Pathology, you may already know that language is different to communication skills. Language Developmental Milestones focus on your child’s ability to understand what others are saying, or what words mean in a book. It really comes down to the meaning of the words we use in everyday social conversation.
For a typically developing 6 year old, we would expect them to be capable of:
- Reading books that are appropriate for their age
- Sounding out or decoding unfamiliar words
- Focusing on a task in school for 15 minutes
- Understanding the concept of numbers
- Knowing day from night and left from right
- Telling the time
- Repeating three numbers backwards
- Recognise short, high-frequency words in text (the, in, on, is)
- Has a vocabulary of about 10,000 words
- Understanding time-related words like next time and tomorrow
After reading this list of Communication and Language Developmental Milestones for 6-Year-Olds, we hope you’ve learned something valuable! It’s amazing to think how much our little ones are capable of at just 6 years old.
However, if reading this list has made you reconsider whether your child is reaching their milestones, we are here to help. At SpeechEase Speech Therapy we have Speech Pathology clinics in Brisbane, Mackay, and Townsville where we can support you and your child on the path to growth and communication skills development.
Give us a call on 1300 773 273 or click here to register for our priority list.
Sources:
https://www.webmd.com/parenting/guide/child-at-6-milestones
https://www.medicinenet.com/developmental_milestones_for_a_6-year-old/article.htm
