Preschool Lesson Plans For 4-5 Year Olds

Teaching preschoolers, especially those between 4 and 5, is rewarding and challenging. These early years are super important for building the skills kids need to succeed in school and life. Preschool lesson plans for 4-5-year-olds should help young learners develop important foundational skills that will ready them for elementary school. By creating fun and engaging learning experiences, teachers can help kids explore and discover the world around them.

As you read on, we will explore strategies for developing essential early reading, writing, and number skills. From phonics and phonemic awareness to counting, sorting, and problem-solving, we’ll provide practical examples and tips to help you create engaging and enriching learning experiences for your pre-K kiddos.

We hope to provide you with tools and resources for crafting engaging lesson plans that will spark a lifelong love of learning in your preschoolers.

Effective lesson planning is indispensable in preschool education. It’s like a roadmap that helps ensure every kid learns and grows. Preschoolers are like little sponges, soaking up everything around them.

It’s super important for young learners to fill their days with things that help them think, feel, move, and explore. I always like to stress the importance of hands-on, play-based learning in the early years.

I’ve put together many fun lesson plan ideas based on different themes, and you can grab them for free on my website! If you want to make things even easier, check out my complete set of learn-at-home lesson plans. They’re ready to go and will help you plan awesome weekly themes all year.

How Do You Teach A 4-5 Year Old?

Teaching little ones isn’t just about book learning. It’s about having fun and making learning exciting! 

It’s important to keep things fun while teaching and reviewing concepts. We can do this by mixing in playtime with learning time. For example, we can play games that help children learn sounds in words, simple math like adding and subtracting, or even science concepts. Writing stories and working together on games can help young children learn to share and be kind to others.

It’s also super important to be kind and patient with your preschoolers, making them feel safe and happy in your classroom. Building that trust really helps them learn and grow.

What Should A 4-5-Year-Old Know Academically?

The formative years of four to five are crucial in a child’s development. Essential skills such as communication, basic numeracy, early literacy, and social interaction start to take shape. Children at this age should be able to follow simple instructions, count to ten, recognize basic shapes, and demonstrate an interest in books and stories. Equally important is their social development, which includes learning to share, take turns, and cooperate with peers.

To accurately assess a child’s readiness for kindergarten, it is important to evaluate progress in several key areas. These include their ability to recognize letters and sounds, their grasp of fundamental math concepts, and their overall cognitive development. Strong problem-solving, memory, and social-emotional skills are vital to a child’s academic preparedness. By carefully considering these factors, educators and parents can gain valuable insights into a child’s strengths and areas for growth.

Lesson Plans For 4-5-Year-Old Preschoolers

Preschoolers at this age are brimming with curiosity and energy. Their minds are constantly seeking new experiences and challenges. Effective preschool lesson plans should incorporate stimulating and engaging activities to meet the needs of these active, developing young brains.

To capture and maintain children’s attention, lessons should be brief, varied, and hands-on. By providing opportunities for exploration and discovery, you can help foster a love of learning and critical thinking skills while accommodating the short attention spans typical of this age group.

Preschool Literacy Lesson Plans 

Our Preschool literacy lesson plans are designed to guide your little learners step-by-step. Each lesson builds on the previous one, helping your students feel confident and excited about learning to read. 

These complete and comprehensive literacy lesson plans include forty weeks of DAILY lessons in oral language, phonological awareness, and phonics skills. You will also find easy-to-follow instructions and fun activities for both group and individual learning throughout the lessons. Watch your students blossom as they develop the skills they need to become successful communicators, readers and writers.

Here are the incredible units in our literacy lesson plans for preschoolers:

Oral Language Lesson Plans for Preschool

Oral language is the foundation for all future communication and literacy skills. Effective oral language development involves building vocabulary, understanding what others say, and expressing thoughts and ideas clearly. Preschoolers benefit greatly from engaging in activities that foster these skills.

Our oral language lesson plans include a variety of concepts such as: following one-step directions, participating and taking turns in discussions, interpreting songs and poems, role playing, sharing experiences, making up new parts of stories, songs or poems, answering questions using complete sentences, and so much more!

Phonological Awareness Preschool Lesson Plans

Phonological awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds of language. It’s a crucial skill for developing reading proficiency. Preschoolers can begin to develop this skill through fun and engaging activities.

Rhyming, clapping syllables, and identifying beginning sounds are effective strategies for introducing children to the sounds of language. These activities help them become aware of the different sounds in words and how they fit together.

Our phonological awareness lesson plans include a wide variety of concepts including: developing listening habits, identifying and generating rhyming words, syllable counting and segmentation, blending onset and rime, beginning and ending sounds, listening for phonemes, and more!

Letter Recognition (Phonics) Lesson Plans for Preschool

Letter recognition is the first step in learning to read. By teaching children to recognize and name letters, we provide the building blocks for phonics and decoding words.

Phonics-based lesson plans focus on the relationship between letters and their corresponding sounds. Through explicit instruction and hands-on activities, children can learn to identify letters, match them to their sounds, and begin to sound out simple words.

Our daily phonics lesson plans include important resources including: daily alphabet routines, meaningful letter and sound practice, reading and writing connections, alphabet bulletin board cards, letter cards, alphabet picture cards, and more!

Preschool Math Lesson Plans

Our Preschool Math Curriculum offers a dynamic approach to teaching math. It replaces traditional worksheets with engaging daily activities that cover all essential math concepts. Each day, children explore new skills, reinforce what they’ve learned, connect math to reading, and practice independently. 

Here are the different components of our comprehensive preschool math lesson plans:

Counting Lesson Plans

Counting is one of the most important fundamental skills that we teach in preschool. Our counting lesson plans are actually divided into three units: counting 0-5, counting 0-10, and counting 0-20. This helps differentiate lessons for different levels of readiness. All of our counting lesson plans are based on five and ten-frame math. They include the following important skills: number identification, one-to-one correspondence, comparing quantities, and composing ten. And like all of our lesson plans, the activities are engaging and fun!

Comparing and Sorting Lesson Plans

Laying the groundwork for logical reasoning and problem-solving starts with comparing and sorting objects. By examining differences and similarities based on size, color, shape, and other attributes, preschoolers begin to understand patterns and categories. Develop logical thinking and classification skills by comparing objects based on size, color, shape, and other attributes. 

You will find extensive activities related to the following concepts in our comparing and sorting lesson plans: making matches, identifying sets, classifying items by single attributes, classifying items by multiple attributes, recognizing and creating patterns, understanding patterns, relations, and functions, comparing sets for similarities and differences, recognizing relationships between sets, and understanding how rules apply to sets.

Shapes Lesson Plans

Introducing basic shapes like circles, squares, triangles, and rectangles through songs, stories, and hands-on activities helps children develop spatial awareness and visual discrimination skills.

Daily lessons in our shapes unit include fun, hands-on activities that allow preschoolers to explore all of the ins and outs of shapes. Targeted skills include: identifying shapes, understanding specific shape attributes, matching shapes, identifying shapes in irregular positions (ie: upside down), shape formation, and sorting shapes by attributes. Your preschoolers will delight in all of these engaging activities as they become masters of shapes!

Positions and Patterns Lesson Plans

Spatial reasoning is enhanced by exploring concepts above, below, in front, behind, and next to. Creating and recognizing positions and patterns with objects, colors, and shapes helps children develop logical thinking and problem-solving abilities.   Develop spatial awareness and understanding of patterns through activities involving location words and repeating sequences.

Our positions and patterns lesson plans focus on these three developmentally appropriate types of patterns: AB, ABC, and AABB. By using our daily lesson plans, your preschoolers will learn to recognize, describe, copy, extend, and create these different types of patterns. And, the best part? They will have a whole lotta fun as they learn!

Measurement Lesson Plans

Measurement introduces the concepts of length, weight, and capacity using everyday objects and fosters curiosity and exploration. Children learn to compare quantities and make estimations through hands-on experiences.

There are many foundational skills included in our engaging daily measurement lessons, such as: more and less, number order by quantity, size (big, bigger, biggest), comparing size in up to five objects, length, height, weight, and practice with non-standard units of measurement. Watch your preschoolers delight in all things measurement!

Graphing Lesson Plans

Graphing introduces children to data collection and analysis in a fun and accessible way. Your preschoolers will explore data analysis by learning to organize information, make observations, and draw conclusions by creating simple graphs.

Specific skills that are taught and utilized in our graphing unit include: organizing information; reading, comparing and transferring data, producing data sets, and identifying the parts of graphs. Our lessons use basic graphs that are developmentally appropriate for preschoolers including: vertical bar graphs, horizontal bar graphs, pictographs, and tally marks.

Addition and Subtraction Lesson Plans

Building a strong foundation in numbers begins with concrete experiences. Through manipulatives and real-life examples, preschoolers can start to understand the concepts of addition and subtraction as they explore quantities and relationships between numbers.

Don’t be intimidated by the idea of addition and subtraction in your pre-K classroom. There really is a place for it! The emphasis is on exploring concepts in a hands-on way and focusing on breaking things down into basic skills components. These foundational concepts include: more and less, increasing and decreasing quantities, number sequencing, composing and decomposing within 5, and composing and decomposing within 10.

We hope you are excited to incorporate the fun lessons we highlighted into your preschool lesson plans for 4-5 year olds. The preschool years are a critical foundation for lifelong learning and development. By focusing on a well-rounded preschool lesson plans curriculum encompassing language, literacy, math, and social skills, we can equip young children with the tools they need to succeed.

From building strong communication skills to developing a love of learning, preschool experiences play an invaluable role in shaping future success.

Sarah Punkoney, MAT

I’m Sarah, an educator turned stay-at-home-mama of five! I’m the owner and creator of Stay At Home Educator, a website about intentional teaching and purposeful learning in the early childhood years. I’ve taught a range of levels, from preschool to college and a little bit of everything in between. Right now my focus is teaching my children and running a preschool from my home. Credentials include: Bachelors in Art, Masters in Curriculum and Instruction.

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