Approaches to learning

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Five-year-olds are creative and enthusiastic problem-solvers. They offer progressively more imaginative ideas for how to do a task, make something, or solve longer-term or more abstract challenges. As they participate in a variety of new experiences, five-year-olds ask more analytical questions and weigh their choices. They are also more social as they learn new things and prefer activities that involve other children.

Initiative, engagement and persistence

• Deliberates and weighs choices (e.g. may spend a long time thinking about whether to go to the shops with mum or to stay home and help dad). 
• Can maintain focus on a project for a sustained period of time (e.g. spends a rainy day building a complicated fort made out of chairs and blankets, complete with props and signs). Is able to return to an activity after being interrupted.
• Persists in longer-term or complex projects, with supervision. Can return to projects begun the previous day. Uses self-talk and other strategies to help finish difficult tasks and assignments from adults (e.g. a school project to make an alphabet book). 
• Chooses and follows through on self-selected learning tasks. Shows interest and skill in more complex self-help skills (e.g. decides to learn to swim, zips jacket, prepares a snack).

Curiosity and eagerness to learn

• Tries an even wider range of new experiences, both independently and with peers and adults (e.g. goes on a camping trip with grandparents, tries to learn to play piano like older brother). May deliberately take risks when learning new skills. 
• Asks higher-level questions; for example, ‘What would happen if we had no food?’ or ‘Why was Raymond mad at me?’
• Expands verbal and nonverbal enthusiasm for learning new things, including academic (e.g. reading, writing) and physical skills (e.g. riding a bike).

Reasoning and problem-solving

• Is increasingly able to think of possible solutions to problems. Can use varied and flexible approaches to solve longer-term or more abstract challenges (e.g. when planning to have friends over on a rainy day, thinks about how to deal with a limited space to play).
• Analyses complex problems more accurately to identify the type of help needed; for example, ‘I think I know how to play this game, but I think you'll have to help me get started. Then I can do the rest’. 
• Continues to benefit from hands-on experiences to support more abstract thinking skills (e.g. makes a book about a holiday, complete with sections for each place visited, drawings and labels written with adult help).

Invention and imagination

• Collaborates with other children in extended and complex pretend play, taking on more varied roles and situations (e.g. acts out roles of lions, hunters, rescuers, and other animals in a dramatic and sustained scenario).
• Offers increasingly creative, unusual ideas about how to do a task, how to make something, or how to get from one place to another; for example, ‘Let's use these old boxes to make a spaceship! Where's some paint?’.

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