What Can You do to Support the Development of 3 Year Old Children?
We have tried to summarize below some areas that you can focus on to support your child’s development after the age of 3:
Physical Development
Indoors and outdoors, you can do activities where he can run, climb, do small jumps and improve his balance.
Do creative games and moves that keep him focused longer. For example, you walk ahead on a line; Ask him to follow you and do the same movements as you. You can do different movements such as crouch walking, walking slow/fast, jumping, raising your hands, opening them.
Age 3 is quite suitable for getting started with board and small group games. You can find the board games we recommend at these ages in our Kidokit application. Do lots of art activities such as play dough, painting, scissor-cutting exercises. Thus, you can develop your child’s fine motor skills, visual perception skills and creativity.
You can play with blocks, puzzles and age-appropriate legos. By doing exercises to imitate certain drawings, sequences and patterns, you support fine motor muscles, visual perception and mental development on the other.
Encourage them to get into as many different bodily positions as possible. For example, you can increase their bodily self-confidence by allowing them to explore their bodies in different positions such as overhead (such as somersaults), prone swaying, and moving ground.
Self Care Skills
You can create the necessary environments for them to dress themselves. Choose clothes that are loose and easy to put on and take off as much as possible. As you master these, you can switch to more difficult buttoned, fastened clothes or narrower ones.
Make sure to work together on housework. Encourage your child to eat his own food and give him time and opportunity by showing that you believe he can do this job very well.
Brush your teeth together, wash your hands so that they can learn and apply them from you.
Social Development:
Set aside ample time slots to spend time together. During these times, we recommend that you do not take your mobile phone with you and take care to be with your child completely.
Teach him to share, be an example and appreciate him.
Give small responsibilities. Avoid rewards or gifts as he fulfills his responsibilities. Encourage him with small recognitions.
Play little drama games and take on different roles with different imitations. For example, giving him an apron while helping you with housework and wearing a chef’s hat while helping you with food will make all these tasks much more enjoyable.
You can play sequential games so you can encourage her to learn to wait her turn.
You can teach him to wait. For example, make a cake with your child and ask him to wait for it to bake. You can help him learn to wait in line by getting in the queue for the cinema together.
Emotional Development
You can offer activities where they can taste success.
We recommend that you avoid making comparisons with others. You can encourage him in his own development line by saying, “You made your picture even better this time”.
Learn the developmental steps of this age and do not set your expectations above it. Remember, every child’s developmental pace is different. It is important that we give your child the opportunity to learn at their own pace.
Do funny things, spend fun and quality time together. funny books
you can read.
We recommend that you have rules and pay attention to the rules. Take care to be loving and appreciative parents who have rules and boundaries when necessary.
Make sure we have a chat time every day. What you are experiencing today, what emotions you are experiencing, what solutions you apply when a problem occurs, etc. share it. Usually, conversations before sleep create great opportunities for these sharing. It also provides psychological relief to the child.
Language Development
Sing songs, play puppet games, learn nursery rhymes, read lots of books and play games of description and narration. Do not forget that first short sentences and then as you master, you can move on to more complex and inflected sentence structures.
You can give them successive directives to do. First start with 1; after 2
Then 3. In this way, we can both use the working memory that we call ‘working memory’.
you strengthen.
You can be an example of the way they express themselves and express what they want. Don’t forget to use words like “please, thank you, you’re welcome” so they can use you as an example.
You can organize cause-and-effect conversations.
Sensory Development
You can do exercises that will appeal to all your senses. First, match the fabrics of different textures with their eyes open, then close their eyes and ask them to match only by touch. In this way, the tactile discrimination system develops. The tactile discrimination system is the foundation of fine motor skills.
Make different tissue boxes. Like beans, rice, sand boxes. You can ask them to find the objects by putting different objects in the boxes.
You can play games of matching different weights by weighing them with their hands.
You can listen to different music such as Jazz, Turkish Classical Music.
You can play smell games. For example, put different scented materials in small jars and ask them to distinguish between scents.
Mental Development
You can share your appetite and enjoyment of learning with him.
You can play color and matching games.
You can play counting games.
Especially after the age of 3.5, you can put tags on things.
You can play sorting and classification games.
You can try to increase focus time by scheduling longer and more sequential activities.
You can take the activity books prepared for this age and do the exercises together.
If your child spends time in front of a screen, remember to limit the use of TV and all other digital equipment to no more than 1 hour per day. Another suggestion regarding the time to be spent in front of the screen is accompanied by an adult if possible; is to ensure that it is a time to spend by establishing relationships, learning and having fun.