Milestones: By the age of seven

Hear it, get it
Your seven year old can listen to you when you ask a question or give them an instruction and work out which bits of information are important. They know when they don’t understand and can ask you to explain, e.g. “Is the author the one that writes the story and the pictures are done by someone else?” Your seven year old can understand instructions with two or three parts that are more complicated, e.g. “Choose a person from the story we’ve just read, tell me how they feel at the end of the story and why you think that is.”

Play a game
Get a list of words from a topic your child is learning at school. Choose one word and challenge you child to say it in a sentence. Does it make sense?

Story telling
Choose a story you both know well, e.g. Red Riding Hood. Talk about the wolf. Is he good or bad? Ask your child to say why they think he is good or bad. What’s in the story that tells them?

Words up
Your seven year old is learning lots of new words and can put words together by meaning as well as how they sound and look.

Your child is learning to compare words in different ways, by look, sound and meaning, e.g. “Bare and bear sound the same but they mean different things.”

They can guess words when given clues like shape, size and letters, e.g. “It’s a large animal, grey with thick skin, not an elephant and it starts with the letter ‘h’.”

Your seven year old will enjoy using new words they’re learning and telling you what they mean, e.g. “symmetry is when you draw a line down a shape and it’s the same on each side.”

• opposites, say a word and then think of the opposite, e.g. hot, cold
• the yes/no game, challenge your child do talk to you without using yes or no, it’s quite hard to do!
• describing word charades, your child thinks of an action, e.g. swimming, adds a describing word, for example slowly and acts it out for you to guess.

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Age 5-7 milestones

5 years > 7 years