Activities by Age for 5-Year-Olds

These engaging activities can help your 5-year-old become more familiar with individual words and letters.

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Beginning Writing
Letter Knowledge
Oral Language
Phonological Awareness

A Fancy Dinner

Next time you plan dinner, get your child involved in creating name tents for the table. This activity helps build kids’ beginning writing skills.

A Few of My Favorite Things

Help your child create her own book showcasing some of her favorite things. With your help, she’ll be both the author and the illustrator of it!

Can You Draw What I Say?

This activity helps with beginning writing and phonological awareness. As you say the name of an object, your child will figure out the word and draw a picture of it.

Comic Strip Writing

Use comic strips to encourage kids’ creativity, even before they learn to read. The animation and characters are fun, and the stories are easy to understand.

Giraffes Can Dance!

In the book Giraffes Can’t Dance, Gerald the Giraffe is an amazing dancer. To celebrate him, help your child write an acrostic poem that describes Gerald.

Healthy Habits

Healthy habits help your child build beginning writing skills.

Journal Writing

Build beginning writing skills by helping your child keep a journal. Making writing part of your child’s daily routine can help with school later on.

Name Dictionary

Help your child learn more about words by making a Name Dictionary. This activity can help develop stronger spelling and reading skills.

Right Now, I Feel ...

There are many feelings that can happen in a day. In this activity, your child will explore different emotions while also practicing beginning writing skills.

The Shopping List

Next time you start to write a grocery shopping list, stop. You can turn this everyday chore into an authentic writing experience for your child.

Treasure Map

Following and making treasure maps are great ways to get your child to read and write. You can even have your whole family join in on the fun.

A Letter a Day

Creating an Alphabet Book helps kids practice writing uppercase and lowercase letters, recognize beginning sounds and make something memorable.

Alpha Pics

This fun activity encourages children to use a cell phone camera to capture their findings from a letter hunt. They play detective and you review the evidence.

Laughing Letters

With this fun activity your child makes up and draws pictures for sentences using words that begin with the same letter.

Letter Bingo

Bingo is a classic activity that can be both fun and educational.

Letter Matching

This matching activity helps kids learn to recognize letters more quickly. It involves a homemade alphabet chart and magnetic or foam letters.

Letters Are Just Sticks and Curves

In this activity, your child will have the chance to see letters, hear letter names and sounds, make letters and explore letters using textures.

Letters, Letters, Everywhere!

This activity helps your child recognize uppercase and lowercase letters and even short words by searching for them in magazines and newspapers.

Let’s Make a Book

Take your camera and capture some of the signs and words your child is starting to recognize. You’ll use the photos to create a book that your child can read.

Listen! Look! Splat!

This activity motivates your child to have fun with sight words by using a flyswatter. Learning sight words helps kids become more confident readers.

The Alphabet Book Has My Letters

This activity helps improve letter-sound correspondence. Kids get to use a favorite alphabet book and their budding knowledge of letters and sounds.

Word Detective

This activity gives kids good practice in learning sight words so they can say them quickly when they see them. It’s an important step in learning to read.

Conversation Cards

Using question cards is a great way to get family members thinking and talking about different topics. Here are some ideas to help you make your own fun cards.

Delightful Directions

Help kids use their expressive language skills by letting them guide you, step by step, through an activity they know by heart.

Fun With Fruit

In this activity, children use their senses to describe various fruits or snacks. It’s a delicious way to help improve kids’ language skills.

Fun With Junk

A rich vocabulary is important to reading comprehension. This activity is a simple way to help your child develop vocabulary by exploring everyday objects.

Fun With Positional Words

This activity gives your child a chance to listen closely to directions, show an understanding of positional words and make a work of art.

Let's Talk About Safety

Help develop your child’s decision-making and problem-solving skills.

Let’s Go Outside!

Connecting kids with nature and talking about it is a great way to help them build a rich vocabulary. Here’s how to make being outdoors a learning experience.

Mystery Bag Detective: Making ‘Sense’ of It

In this activity, your child will use her senses to guess a mystery item in a brown paper lunch bag. This helps encourages kids’ oral language skills.

Stories to Grow On

Practice the tradition of storytelling with your child by creating characters and experiences. You might be surprised at how much your child like these tales.

Voice Magic

This activity teaches kids that how they use their voice matters. They’ll learn that the way things are said can change how words feel and what they mean.

What Can It Be?

Stimulate vocabulary and conversation skills with this game. You give clues about pictures and your child tries to guess what you’re describing.

Counting Words

In this easy activity, your child will practice listening for individual words in sentences.

Guess the Word

In this activity, your child will separate the beginning sound in a word from the rest of the word. It’s called onset and rime, an important pre-reading skill.

How Many Sounds in ‘L-o-g’?

In this activity, your child will learn to use objects to visually represent the sounds in words. This helps kids become stronger readers and spellers.

Illustrate the Poem

For this activity, kids take a familiar poem and add drawings to it. The illustrated poem might even become part of a poetry book that your child creates.

Let’s Write Some Rhyming Words

In this activity, kids combine rhyme and beginning sounds to start writing rhyming words. This helps them become more sensitive to the sounds of language.

Long Word, Short Word!

An easy, fun listening game to help your child learn about the length of syllables in words.

Nursery Rhymes With a Twist

In this fun activity, you and your child work on rhyming skills by rewriting traditional nursery rhymes with a more modern and silly twist.

Race to the Rhymes!

Have kids show you what they know about rhyme with this fun game. It will get your child to move and think of rhyming words quickly.

Sound Spy

This version of I Spy is the perfect game to play at home or on the go and is a great way to help your child listen for specific sounds within words.

Take Your Time, Turtle

Playing with the sounds in words can help your child understand that words are made up of smaller units of sound. This is an important pre-reading skill.

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Activities by Age for 5-Year-Olds

A Fancy Dinner

A Few of My Favorite Things

Can You Draw What I Say?

Comic Strip Writing

Giraffes Can Dance!

Healthy Habits

Journal Writing

Name Dictionary

Right Now, I Feel ...

The Shopping List

Treasure Map

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