A four-year-old child

• Seeks out and enjoys companionship of peers
• Engages in dramatic make-believe play with peers
• Holds conversation skillfully with a variety of people
• Able to shift attention spontaneously from what she is doing to what somebody is saying and back to what she is doing again
• Continues to use strategy of doing what is usually done in response to improbable instructions e.g. ‘make the baby feed mum’
• Understands sentences with up to six key words e.g. ‘Put the small bag and the cup under Daddy’s chair’
• Understands and uses all basic grammatical structures with occasional mistakes e.g. ‘I went to the circus and sawed the clowns’
• Uses language to express ideas and feelings, discuss plans, problem-solve and negotiate
• Asks lots of questions, especially using ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’
• Able to express herself clearly on most occasions, reflecting a vocabulary consisting of thousands of words
• Uses complex sentences with two or more verbs to link ideas
• Tells stories about connected past events providing an introduction, sufficient background knowledge, an account of what happened and information on how the story ended
• Uses ‘can’, ‘will’, ‘is’, ‘are’, ‘have’, ‘do’ correctly e.g. ‘I can jump’
• Speech is clear, with few immaturities e.g. thank you –> fank you