What Should My Five-Year-Old Be Learning?

Easter egg hunts are a beloved tradition but can be messy and time-consuming. Learning Resources Snap-n-Learn Toys are the perfect solution if you're looking for a fun alternative. This blog post will explore how these toys can be used as Easter egg alternatives and why they're a great addition to any child's toy collection.

Snap-n-Learn Toys are colorful, interactive toys designed to help young children learn essential skills such as counting, sorting, and matching. They come in various shapes and sizes and are made of durable plastic that can withstand the wear and tear of little hands.

Instead of filling plastic eggs with candy and trinkets, you can use Snap-n-Learn Toys as the eggs! These toys are not only fun to play with, but they also allow your child to learn and develop essential skills. For example, you can use the Snap-n-Learn toys to create a scavenger hunt, each containing a clue to the following location.

Snap-n-Learn Toys are a fun and educational Easter egg alternative and provide numerous benefits for your child's development. These toys can help your child develop fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and problem-solving skills. They also encourage creativity and imagination, as your child can use the toys to create their own stories and scenarios.

Learning Resources Snap-n-Learn Toys are a perfect Easter egg alternative that is fun and educational. They allow your child to learn and develop essential skills while promoting creativity and imagination. Using these toys as Easter egg alternatives, you can create a memorable holiday tradition that your child will love.

Four-year-olds are so much fun! Becoming more independent by the minute, fours are generally super social and extra energetic. They’ll probably begin to push the boundaries a bit this year, though, and will likely give up on napping (sorry, Mom). They’ll also benefit from time away from parents and caregivers as they prepare to enter Kindergarten next year. Below is a list of other social-emotional, language, cognitive, and physical skills you may see emerge this year (but remember, kids progress at their speeds and may pick up these skills earlier or later!):

Social-Emotional Skills

Your baby is officially a preschooler now, learning to identify and express their emotions appropriately, with words rather than emotions. Other exciting social, emotional skills your four-year-old will likely learn this year include:

• Approaching new experiences with excitement
• Preferring playing with friends than alone (and can take turns and cooperate most of the time)
• Sharing information about things they’re interested in
• Role-playing mom or dad during pretend playtime
• Clearly expressing a thought or idea

Language Skills

Look out! With an average vocabulary of up to 1,600 words, your four-year-old has plenty to say! Fours are becoming much more communicative, using longer, clearer sentences, singing songs, playing word games, even reciting short poems! Here are some other language skills your four-year-old may acquire this year:

• Speaking fluently and enough to be understood by strangers
• Telling a story about something that happened to them
• Singing a simple song from memory… Oh, the wheels on the bus go…
• Answering questions beginning with who, what, where, when, why, how many…
• Playing simply rhyming games (cluck says the duck!)

Cognitive Skills

Fours are building the foundation for future learning, practicing shapes, letters, numbers, counting, and attempting to write and draw. By the time most kids start Kindergarten (usually around age five), they’ll:

• Know their full name and maybe their phone number
• Recognize letters, numbers, and signs
• Count 10 or more objects
• Draw a person with 4-6 body parts (head with mouth and eyes, body with arms and legs)
• Understand comparative terms like big/small, short/tall, same/different, empty/full, etc.

Physical Skills

It may feel like your four-year-old is in constant motion, running, jumping, climbing, hopping, and hiding all day long. In addition to honing their gross motor skills, this year, they’ll also be refining key fine motor movements that allow them to dress and feed themselves (hooray). Other physical skills your little one will be working on this year include:

• Buttoning and unbuttoning their clothing
• Using childsafe scissors
• Running faster and climbing higher than they did at three
• Balancing on one foot for 3 seconds
• Walking a “tightrope”
• Climbing stairs with no support

Remember that kids develop at different speeds, so don’t worry if it’s taking your little one a little longer to master any of the skills above. You can support their development by practicing these things at home, in a fun way – and you can track your child’s milestones by age with the CDC’s mobile milestone app!

I am currently in the fun position of being a Preschool teacher and being Mom to a preschooler. It is honestly such a magical stage of childhood, and I love how much playful learning happens daily. I am always on the lookout for engaging new materials with my daughter and preschool class, so I was excited to test out Learning Resources® Preschool Letters and Numbers Skill Builders! Sets. In this first blog, we will focus on the Letters Set.

I like to keep learning hands-on for preschoolers, especially when first helping them discover letters and sounds. The Skill Builders! Preschool Letters Set comes with a good selection of materials to learn about uppercase and lowercase letters. You get a detailed activity guide to help inspire learning ideas, as well as laces and threading letter beads, a color spinner, picture and letter cards, and some interactive paper sheets with activity ideas on them. We laminated many of these sheets as they work great with dry-erase markers, which means they can be used multiple times.

1. Letter Threading - My four-year-old went straight for the letter threading materials. She was super excited to make a ‘name necklace.’ She carefully identified the letters in her name and threaded them onto the lace. This is great for her fine motor skills, which helps build the muscle strength in her hand, ready for writing. She spoke about the shapes of the letters as she threaded them onto the lace as well.

2. Letter Matching - Next up, she liked flipping over the letter cards and matching both the uppercase and lowercase letter beads onto the cards. As she did this, I encouraged her to trace the letter on the card with her finger, and we said the name of the letter and the sound that it made. She loved it when she was able to tell me a word she knew, starting with the sound! On the back of the letter cards, there are vibrant illustrations of something starting with the letter, which was a great way to expand her knowledge.

3. Color Matching - The last activity we chose was a color matching game using the spinner. Preschoolers always love flicking the spinner and watching excitedly to see where it lands. My daughter would spin, identify the color and then choose a letter bead. I challenged her to tell me the name of the letter; we would then make the sound together and try to think of at least three words starting with the letter. If we came up with three words, we got to thread it onto the lace. You could add an extra element of challenge to this by each having your lace and seeing who could thread the most letters on in a given time (remember to come up with the three words each time, though). You can also repeat this activity with lowercase letters to keep the learning developing.

The activity guide left us with so many more great ideas to try. Our favorite material was the letter beads, and we can’t wait to use them in some sensory bins as well seen as they can be easily washed. I love that this set is versatile and comes with a range of hands-on activities, all of which can be adjusted for the stage of learning your preschooler is at.

Writer’s Bio

Lucy Baker is a Mom of two (4 & 8 years old) passionate about creative play and hands-on learning. She firmly believes in providing children with the opportunity to learn through play and being part of their play journey as a parent. See more of her creative play ideas and process art projects on Instagram @findthelittlemind, and over on her blog, Find the Little Mind.