What is the attention span of yourfour or five year old?

[samba2nite]

I'm really curious on this one. I have a soon to be five year old (in six weeks) and her span to keep her attention on reading or math work or simply listening to a book is about 10 minutes. IT is sad but I cannot remember how long my last two yahoos were able to stay at attention but I think it was about 20 minutes at this age....but maybe I am dilusional or am just getting old!

 

So if you have a four year old five year old or six year what are their attentions spans for staying on task or listening.

 

Thanks

[PeterPan]

10 minutes for anything serious. Much longer if it's a read aloud while they're doing something else like playing.

[YHZNS]

My daughter will be 5 in a few weeks. For seatwork she is good for up to 15 minutes. She is obviously more attentive when we are doing subjects she likes. She detests phonics (it is getting better). The best thing I ever did was to break our phonics sessions up into 3 5-minute sessions throughout the day. She is much more productive this way. For read-alouds she is good for about an hour maybe longer if she wants me to finish the book.

[Shannon C]

Don't expect more than 10-15 min. at this age. Don't push! I did this with disastrous results. I regret how we started our homeschool journey and I'm still trying to undo the damage with my 6 1/2 year old. Unless they have an extreme interest and want to keep going, I would limit it to a short 10 min. session for each subject, no longer than 20 min. straight with interest.

[Macrina]

30 min for math, but he loves it and he does it laying down, hopping around, swinging on the indoor swinging, or whatever suits him. 15 min for read alouds, he's not literary minded. About 10 minutes for everything else that's seat work. History projects, science experiments, crafts, lapbooks, cooking, coloring, cutting, pasting....I figure this is all the stuff he's suppose to be doing at this age anyway and the attention span is 30 min or more.

[In the Rain]

I have a 4yo dd who will be 5 in April. She can do seatwork, or read to me, for 10-15 minutes. She will listen to someone else read aloud for as long as they will read, more than 40 minutes.

[Alice]

10-15 minutes for seatwork for my 5 1/2 yr old. I let him wiggle a lot and get up in the middle to "exercise" and we can go 30 min. He can listen to me read for a lot longer, if it's books he likes and he can play Legos for approximately 14 hours. Give or take.

[Tree House Academy]

Oh heck, I must be a slave driver! My 5.5 year old does school for 1-1.5 hours, most of it seatwork/reading/writing. It is all of the subjects for the day though...not just one thing for that amount of time.

 

I had to laugh at the lego for approximately 14 hours comment. LOL My son is that way with transformers. Literally...HOURS.

[Jumping In Puddles]

my 4 year old: phonics maybe 2-3 minutes, handwriting, maybe 4 or 5 minutes, read alouds for her are short picture books.

 

My 5 year old: phonics: 20 minutes, handwriting 20 minutes, read alouds for him are endless! He could sit and listen to stories for hours!

[sgmaddox]

My 4 year old, really enjoys flash card and memory, 10-15 minutes tops. He also loves to listen to reading for any length of time, especially Dr. Seuss.

 

But he goes to a speech therapy class where the therapist will have him engaged for 50 minutes, no problem.

[Macrina]

 

But he goes to a speech therapy class where the therapist will have him engaged for 50 minutes, no problem.

 

See, I think my 4yo's seat time at home is less then it would otherwise because 3x a week he has speech in 45 min blocks. It exhausts him, because he works so hard, and so I expect less of him with other home seat work on these days.

[godpoetry]

My four year old will sit still for 10-15 min. at a time, depending on the activity. She likes to be read to, but will sit longer for crafts of course. She is in to making up stories lately for me to write down for her, so she will sit for longer for that also.

[LivingUnderGrace]

My 4 year old sat and listened to Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi ALL afternoon one cold day while we read the entire book! He also sat and listened to 2-3 chapters at a time from Peter Pan by James M Barrie.

[Snickerdoodle]

For self-motivated projects I would say anywhere between 20-60 minutes.

 

For Mom imposed projects between 5-15 minutes.

 

 

:)

 

I don't do more than 15 minutes per day of Mom imposed projects with under six years old in my house.

[SunshineMom]

I must be a slave driver like TreeHouseAcademy. My 5 1/2 dd--we school for 1hr (reading,spelling, math) and 1/2to1hr in the evening either doing SOTW, Biology or Chemistry. Likewise I do read alouds for 1hr in the evening. My 5dd does tire from a 1hr keyboard class, luckly it is only 1x a week. I think the best way to get kids ready for school (sitting) is to read to them. They practice being focused. Build up the time spent and grab as many books as they will listen to. I would also encourage you to read nonfiction as well as fiction. There are many great nonfiction reads.

[Aurelia]

15-30 minutes for "work," 1.5-3 hours for things she likes to do, like free play or computer games.

[Melenie]

DD soon to be 5 will do about an hour in one sitting. We do 3-6 short lessons in that time. We still have to get up and do silly stuff in between just to keep her motivated. If I see a lack of interest I will cut the lesson short and move on. Both my almost 5 year old and 2 year old will listen to me read half an hour of a chapter book each evening.

[AnnetteB]

Slave Driver #3 here. We start as close to 9 a.m. as I can "catch" him and he wriggles his way through phonics and math. He is a curious, talkative, eager learner, but he wanders off on tangents like adding suffixes to all the simple base words he is learning and using every new word in a sentence to show that he knows what it means. I urge him along and we try to have all our work done before lunch at 12:30. The other kids have a difficult time concentrating on his loudest most enthusiastic days.

[CactusPair]

My dd had a short attn. span at the age, 10-15 was the max. My ds was the opposite, he could go for an hour.

 

It just depends on the kid. My dc are older now, but their personalities and attn. spans are still opposite. DD's attn. is longer than it was, but still much shorter than ds's is. At 7, she is only now able to sit and listen to a chapter book.

 

Don't push, go with what works for the kid.

[Jumping In Puddles]

My dd had a short attn. span at the age, 10-15 was the max. My ds was the opposite, he could go for an hour.

 

It just depends on the kid. My dc are older now, but their personalities and attn. spans are still opposite. DD's attn. is longer than it was, but still much shorter than ds's is. At 7, she is only now able to sit and listen to a chapter book.

 

Don't push, go with what works for the kid.

 

EXACTLY! :iagree:

 

I cannot be a slave driver for my 4 year old because she just doesn't have the attention span. When my 5 year old was 4, he had 3-4X the attention span that she has for "schoolwork" and he had NO limits on how long he would sit for a story! (well no limits that I've ever encountered... :lol: )

 

If I grabbed him and said we are going to read ALL of JM Barrie's Peter Pan, he would need only a few breaks to eat and use the bathroom. Even when he was 4. My dd wouldn't make 3 pages.

[Jen in PA]

My 5 year old does best when we keep seatwork to 45 minutes. I try to get all of the workbooky stuff to fit into that time, which it usually does. We spend about another 45 minutes on history and science read-alouds, plus her oral reading, which we can do on the couch. I do other read-alouds for an hour in the evening. She would gladly have me read until my voice wears out, but I can't really go over 90 minutes at a stretch! For tactile/craft activities, she can easily go a couple of hours.

[Mrs. Frankweiler]

My almost 5 year old will tolerate "seatwork" for about 15 minutes, tops. But, I can hold his attention with read alouds and singing for a while longer.

 

-Mrs. F

[Emmy]

I'm astounded as how long some of the other 4/5 year olds are doing school - wow! My 3rd son just turned 5 in December and I don't even school him everyday - we're very loose. To me, he's still a preschooler and should be spending most of his day playing, coloring, playing with playdough, and enjoying books being read to him. He *does* have workbooks - he's about 2/3 of the way through MUS primer and halfway through ETC 1. And he reads a Nora Gaydos reader to me every few days and he sits in on the read alouds I'm doing with the other kids (cause he likes to be with us) but like I said, he doesn't sit down to "do work" every day by any means. This fall I will consider him kinder and I'll be a bit more formal with him by having him do seatwork 4 mornings a week.

[runamuk]

Depending on the activity, my almost 5 year old can sit for 10 to 30 minutes. He'll do about half of a Get Ready/Get Set/Go for the Code books in one sitting, we'll do one page of OPGTR in one sitting, he'll read one Bob book in a sitting, he'll listen to two books at a time, and spend all day doing mazes and dot-to-dots.

 

If he doesn't want to do something, I don't push it at this age.

[kalanamak]

10 minutes for anything serious. Much longer if it's a read aloud while they're doing something else like playing.

 

Yup. That was us. I worked harder on getting GOOD concentration for short periods rather than length of time.

 

Kiddo could listen, with a good cuddle and a desire to put off bedtime, for up to two hours of reading. Oddly, he is less now that he is 6, although he cuddled up for an hour of The Golden Fleece last night.

[Macrina]

I think too there can be a HUGE development in attention span in this age frame. The OP mentions 4, 5 AND 6 yo's. Not only are there personality traits dictating ability for seat work, but an almost five yo may be at 10 min max and then in another 9 months, at 5 1/2 be able to do an hour.

[Narrow Gate Academy]

It depend on the task.

Phonics - 10 minutes. He could do longer, but I'm not pushing him at this point.

Listening to a read aloud that he is interested in - 30-45 minutes

Listening to a read aloud that doesn't interest him - 5-10 minutes

Math only takes us 5 minutes, but I'm sure he could go longer.

[Mommy22alyns]

Sylvia is almost four... well, we won't talk about her attention span! :001_huh:

 

Becca is almost six - we can do more, but some days are better than others. :glare: She can sit and listen to a story for a while if she's in the mood, or sit and read for about 45 minutes. We usually get an hour to an hour and a half of seatwork in before she just has to get up and do gymnastics.

[Melinda]

I have a 4 and a 5. We typically work like this...

 

9-10 - work one on one with DS5

10-11 - work one on one with DD4

11-12 - break

12-1 - work with DS5 and DD4 together

 

So I guess 2 hrs per child, per day. Only one hour at a time, though (about their limit for being really attentive).

[Testimony]

for my church at a Christian Education conference. I wrote this down because it helped me years before I homeschooled. The speaker said that the attention span for a 2-4 year old is about 5-6 minutes. A 5-6 year old is about 6-8 minutes and then so forth.

 

When I taught children's church and I had 25 children from ages 6-12 years old, I did my message in 10 minutes. This is what I discovered: I realized that I needed to teach every 10 minutes. So, if church was 90 minutes long, I had to do 9 changes. It is not so bad because you do worship, lesson, puppets, etc. in 10 minutes. However, if I had a game, that could last a good 20-30 minutes. You would be surprised how much they remember when the lesson is done that way.

 

When I taught in a co-op, a 60 minute lesson for 4 to 5 year olds was about 6 different lessons. That is why I have so many changes in my lessons.

 

Blessings in your homeschooling journey!

 

Sincerely,

Karen

http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/testimony

[ElizabethB]

I never worked more than 10 minutes a day with my daughter in Webster's Speller in K (she was 5) yet we finished the whole thing in a year! It's better to have good, focused time than an hour of kind of paying attention. Then, we'd take a break, then we'd do math (usually less than 10 minutes, sometimes a bit more if we watched the DVD as well--we did MUS last year.) Then, another break, then science. We only did those 3 subjects last year, and she needed those breaks. This year, we do 4-5 subjects a day with one "recess" halfway through. Last year's breaks had to be physical, this year we sometimes play tic-tac-toe and then move on and she's fine.

 

My 3 year old has a short attention span for anything that looks like work, but he'll sit on your lap and look at books for hours (he turns 4 soon.)

 

We just started Spanish a month or so ago, my daughter is really enjoying it, sometimes we'll do Spanish outside of school for an hour or two at a time.