Parents have many questions about the growth and development of their child. Below are some general development milestones regarding your nine your old child from American School Counselor Association.
Where are they?
Nine is a time of general confusion for kids. Nine-year-olds:
- Want to put some distance between themselves and adults, and may rebel against authority
- Want to be part of a group
- Seek independence
- Possess a high activity level
- Can express a wide range of emotions and verbalize easily
- Can empathize
- Can think independently and critically, but are tied to peer standards
- Begin to increase their sense of truthfulness
- Are typically not self-confident
Where are they going?
School isn't just academics. Your child's teachers are also helping her grow socially. At nine-years-old, your child is learning how to make decisions and set standards. You can help by encouraging your child as he or she:
- Begins to make more decisions and engage in group decision-making
- Gains a greater sense of responsibility
- Sets personal standard
- Develops personal interests and abilities
- Develops social skills
- Learns to engage in group decision-making
- Has a greater awareness of fairness
Are they ready for fifth grade?
By the end of fourth grade, you can expect your child to meet the following educational milestones:
- Be able to memorize and recite facts, although he/she may not have a deep understanding of them
- Increase the amount of detail in drawings
- Work on research projects
- Write a structured paragraph with an introductory topic sentence, three supporting details, and a closing sentence that wraps up the main idea of the paragraph
- Use a range of strategies when drawing meaning from text, such as prediction, connections, and inference
- Understand cause-and-effect relationships
- Add and subtract decimals, and compare decimals and fractions
- Multiply multi-digit numbers by two-digit numbers
- Divide larger multi-digit numbers by one-digit numbers
- Find the area of two-dimensional shapes