Between 3-4 years your child’s language skills continue to develop. Children will now be asking many questions and will start to recognise talk about the past and future more easily.
- Make a point of pointing things out to me as we go out on trips.
- Play memory and listening games with me and offer lots of praise when I remember more and more things.
- Talk with me about things we have already done and ask me questions such as “What did you like best when we went to the park?”
- Help me learn new words by repeating what I say and adding a bit more and try to avoid baby talk with me now.
- Speak to me in the language you know best – it helps me understand and learn!
- Let’s sing songs, say rhymes, and read books together. We can talk about the pictures and turn the pages.
Remember, we all learn at different speeds, but here are some things that I might be doing:
- I can talk about things that happened, like “I jumped down”, and things that will happen, like “I will watch you”.
- I’m starting to say sentences with “and”, such as “I went to the park, and I had ice cream”.
- You can usually understand me when I say sounds like p, b, t, d, m, n, and f, though I might still find harder sounds like ‘sh’, ‘ch’, and ‘th’ tricky.
- I can answer questions like “What do you do when you’re hungry or cold?”
- I can tell little stories about things I’ve seen or done, like “two boys played with the ball. It went over the fence”.
Useful Links:
Best Start Communication and Language Flyer
3-4 years – Speech and Language UK: Changing young lives
Learning conversations and telling stories: 3 to 5 years – NHS
