Caring for your Elementary Aged Child (5 – 10)

Developmental characteristics:

• High energy, need lots of activity
• Practicing large muscle and fine motor skills
• Developing physical ability
• Growing attention span
• Respond to simple rules and limits
• Eager to learn
• Creative
• Beginning to reason
• Feel their ideas count
• Easily hurt and insulted
• Identify with the family
• Eager to please
• Enjoy small groups
• Emphasize fairness

Supporting actions and activities:

• Wide variety of activities
• Choices
• Routine
• Frequent individual interaction with adults
• Games with simple rules
• Quiet areas as well as noisy areas
• Outside experiences
• Imaginative play opportunities
• Some clear responsibilities (i.e. clean-up)
• Projects that apply to school day lessons about family and community
• Opportunities to read aloud, silently and to talk about books and ideas
• Matching, ordering and sorting activities
• Small experiments with everyday products
• Nature walks and talks
• Opportunities to work with a variety of materials for projects
• Physical activities that do not emphasize competition (i.e. jump rope, marbles, jacks and kites)
• Music, dance and drama opportunities
• Opportunities to try experiences from diverse culture