Developmental milestones: 3 - 4 years

It is important to encourage your child to play motion games with their peers. You can teach them to play catch, hide-and-seek, ball games, and more. You can also suggest cycling, riding scooters, and so on. Continue to practice motor skills with them, such as climbing and standing on one foot, and find creative ways of incorporating physical activity with play.

At this stage, you should begin reading together, even without knowing the letters. You can have your child sit in your lap, create pleasant contact or eye contact during the story. You should trace the words in the book with your finger to create the understanding of the separate words. Story time is an excellent opportunity to speak to each other: you can speak about the characters – what they do, think, feel. You can also expand, ask questions and create a conversation that can connect events in the story with everyday events.

Creativity using a range of materials allows children to learn about their abilities, develop fine motor skills and use their imagination – and to discuss it. You should encourage children to create by painting, drawing, cutting, making dough, copying shapes, and more. This is also an excellent opportunity to learn numbers; “we have four balls of dough, shall we count together? One, two, three, four”. You do not always need to plan in advance. It is important to allocate time to free play at home and in the yard, thinking games, imagination games, and so on. You can also create a costumes corner.

You should encourage your child to perform simple daily actions independently: eat unassisted, help around the house (putting toys away, putting laundry in the machine), get dressed or undressed. Tip: you should begin with pajamas in the evening, not clothes for preschool in the morning – it can take longer initially but patience pays off.

Conversation skills are key to communication and the development of vocabulary. It makes children feel they are understood, and builds their self-confidence as well as the skills to relay and share how they feel and what they experience. You should encourage your child to speak during walks, when he or she participates in housework, during outdoor activities, and so on. You can direct them to talk about their experiences from the day before, and to incorporate questions in the conversation, speak about emotions, use new words and concepts, and so on. It is important to find opportunities to use prepositions in the conversation: larger than, smaller than, near, far, above, below, next to, behind – are all prepositions that can be practiced.

There is no need to buy special games. You can use objects you have at home such as boxes, markers, dolls, blocks. You often find that out of all the games in the living room, children prefer playing with the drawer of the plastic boxes. You should play with them by matching similar types of objects, same colors in different objects, different sizes and more.

It is important to note your child's preferences and moods, and to adjust the activities and stimuli accordingly so that it will be pleasant. Occasionally, too much stimuli can be overwhelming. If the child looks away or shows signs of irritation and tiredness, try to ‘clean’ the area and reduce stimuli.