EYFS Milestones: What Parents Can Expect From 6 Months to 5 Years
- Kidz Kabin Editorial
- Dec 9, 2025
- 6 min read
Your clear, confident guide to how children grow, learn and thrive - the Kidz Kabin way. Aligned with the Kidz Kabin nursery room guide.
Early childhood is an incredible journey. In just five short years, children go from tiny babies exploring the world with their fingertips to confident preschoolers who ask big questions, make friends, tell stories and begin to understand their place in the world.
The EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) is the national framework for early years education and provides clear guidelines for what children typically learn at each stage.
At Kidz Kabin, the EYFS guides everything we do, but crucially, we never treat milestones as deadlines. Children develop at different speeds, in different ways, and often in delightful, unexpected bursts. Our role is to understand where each child is, meet them there with warmth and curiosity, and gently guide them forward. If you’re currently exploring nursery options, you may also find our guide helpful:
At Kidz Kabin, we have dedicated nursery rooms and spaces designed around children’s stages of development, emotional needs and natural curiosity, to ensure children flourish in the best possible ways.
Our Blue Room provides the calm, nurturing foundations babies and young toddlers need as they discover the world through relationships, sensory exploration and early communication. In our Yellow Room, growing toddlers begin expressing their independence, building language, navigating big feelings and developing confidence through imaginative, hands-on play. By the time children move into our Green Room, they are ready for deeper thinking, richer friendships, early literacy and maths exploration, and the joyful challenges of preparing for school through meaningful play and outdoor learning.
To help you understand typical EYFS development and the general milestones children tend to meet at each stage, we’ve structured this guide around our nursery rooms. But remember: this is simply a guide. Every child grows at their own pace, in their own way, and our role is to nurture that unique journey.
🔵 Blue Room (6 months – 2 years)
🟡 Yellow Room (2 – 3 years)
🟢 Green Room (3 – 5 years / Preschool)
Blue Room (6 Months – 2 Years)
Where connections, curiosity and the spark of communication begins.
The first two years are all about building foundations. Babies and young toddlers learn through relationships, their senses and then gradually through play that becomes more intentional and exploratory.
In Blue Room, children become deeply attached to their key worker; that one familiar, trusted person who becomes their anchor. You’ll often see key workers on the floor, matching a baby’s gaze, mirroring their sounds, offering comfort, or narrating the world around them. These shared moments of attention are crucial in helping language formation.
As babies grow into young toddlers, their communication becomes more expressive. Babbling turns into first words, and gestures turn into attempts to communicate needs and thoughts. You’ll hear lots of “uh?”, “more!”, “mine!”, and increasingly, word combinations; the early signs of language blossoming.
Physically, children go from rolling to sitting, crawling, cruising, walking and then running with joyful unpredictability. They poke, grab, post, shake, scoop, smear and explore anything they can get their hands on. Messy play and tuff trays with coloured rice, spaghetti, oats, paint, animal figurines and leaves, for example, provide endless fun but they also strengthen fine motor skills, build sensory understanding and lay the foundations for later writing.
Emotionally, this is when children begin to understand themselves as little people. They show preferences, express frustration, reach for comfort, and light up when recognised. Our Blue Room gives them a calm, predictable space to feel safe, seen and soothed.
To see how early play supports language, motor skills and emotional development, explore our guide:
Yellow Room (2 – 3 Years)
Language explodes. Independence appears. Big emotions arrive. And with all of the above, big learning takes place.
Two-year-olds are extraordinary. They are curious, opinionated, imaginative and wonderfully unpredictable. If Blue Room is about foundations, Yellow Room is about emergence. Emerging language, emerging independence, emerging social awareness.
This is the age when children begin to stitch words together into sentences, ask questions, and narrate what they see. You’ll often find Yellow Room children at the tuff tray, chatting to each other about dinosaurs, space, food, colours or whatever has captured their imagination that moment. This is early literacy in its most natural form, where children learn through communication, role-play and exploration.
Physically, they become more coordinated: climbing, jumping, balancing and experimenting with how their bodies move. Fine motor strength develops through dough-cutting, threading, painting, mark-making and using tools like rolling pins and child-safe scissors. These activities are indeed “crafts”, but they’re also early writing skills in disguise.
One of the biggest milestones in this age group is toilet training. We support this gently and collaboratively with families, looking for readiness cues and following each child’s pace so that the process feels positive, empowering and developmentally appropriate.
Emotionally, this is the age of BIG feelings. Two-year-olds feel things fully and express joy, frustration, pride and disappointment, sometimes all within 10 minutes. Our job in Yellow Room is to help them recognise feelings, name them, comfort themselves and begin simple strategies for self-regulation. You’ll see practitioners modelling deep breaths, offering choices, using emotion cards and Colour Monster tuff trays and scaffolding early friendships.
Cognitively, Yellow Room children begin to show real thinking skills: sorting, matching, counting, comparing, solving problems and asking “why?” about absolutely everything. They love routines but also love bending them to test boundaries; a key part of becoming confident, secure little learners.
Many of the playful, exploratory activities in Yellow Room are also rich foundations for early reading, maths and social development. You can read more here:
Green Room (3 – 5 Years / Preschool)
Confidence grows, thinking deepens, friendships strengthen and children become ready for school and the wider world.
By the time children reach Green Room, something magical happens. The foundation blocks from earlier years connect. Language becomes richer, play becomes more collaborative, and children start to see themselves as capable, independent learners.
Communication becomes purposeful: sharing ideas, retelling stories, negotiating roles in play (“You be the baby, I’ll be the teacher”), asking complex questions and engaging in conversations that have real back-and-forth flow. You’ll often see children mapping out storylines, building imaginative worlds or narrating what happens in their forest school adventures.
Early literacy begins to take shape in a meaningful way. Children recognise and start writing their names, spot letters in the environment, hear initial sounds and experiment with writing, not by sitting at desks, but through mark-making in rice, drawing maps, writing pretend shopping lists, labelling their constructions, painting on outdoor easels or tracing shapes in sand.
Maths is explored naturally too by counting sticks in the forest, comparing leaves, measuring water, spotting patterns, cooking, sorting objects or working out how many more friends can fit in a den before it collapses.
Physically, Green Room children gain impressive control. They climb, balance, use tools, manage scissors, thread beads, build tall structures and develop the fine motor strength needed for handwriting. Outdoor learning is a major part of Kidz Kabin’s ethos and plays a huge role here. Forest School activities, gardening, digging, creating bug hotels and natural exploration all build coordination, spatial awareness and problem-solving.
Emotionally and socially, preschoolers are learning to be part of a community. They build real friendships, learn empathy, understand turn-taking rules, and become more confident expressing their needs. They also start developing resilience and stick with challenges longer, trying again after setbacks and feeling proud of their achievements.
These final years before school are about preparing children academically, socially and emotionally but are also about strengthening their sense of self, curiosity and joy.
If you’re preparing for your child’s next steps or comparing preschool options, our parent guide explains exactly what to look for:
A Round Up of Thoughts
The EYFS milestones offer a helpful guide, but every child’s journey is unique. At Kidz Kabin, we observe closely, plan thoughtfully and respond sensitively so each child can grow at the pace that’s right for them.
If you're curious about how we turn everyday play into meaningful learning, please take a look at our companion guide:
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