DEVELOPMENT MILESTONES in your pre-schooler

Kerry McArthur | Educator

Child development can be exceptionally detailed and overwhelming. This is the first in a three-part series to demystify child development and milestones by educator Kerry McArthur.

Child development is a process every child goes through. This process involves learning and mastering skills such as sitting, walking, talking, skipping, and tying shoes. Children reach these developmental milestones, during usually predictable time periods.

Children develop skills in five main areas of development: cognitive development, social and emotional development, speech and language development, fine motor skill development and gross motor skill development. We will start this series by looking at cognitive development and language development.

Cognitive Development

• Their imagination will become more vivid. Imaginary friends will make an appearance along with pretend play with dolls and stuffed animals.

• Your child also will learn to match familiar items to pictures of those items.

• They may enjoy simple puzzles (three to four piece puzzles are great for two-year-olds) building up to 12-15 pieces.

• Your child will be able to name pictures of objects and identify familiar activities in books.

Milestones develop in a sequential fashion. This means that a child will need to develop some skills before they can develop new skills. For example, children must first learn to crawl and to pull up to a standing position before they are able to walk. Each milestone that a child acquires builds on the last milestone developed.

This is the child’s ability to learn and solve problems, such as a two-month-old baby learning to explore the environment with hands or eyes, or a five-year-old learning how to do simple math problems.

Some examples of how your child explores.

1-2 YEARS OLD

• Understand and respond to words

• Identify objects that are similar

• Tell the difference between “me” and “you”

• Imitate the actions and language of adults

• Can point out familiar objects and people in a picture book

• Learn through exploration

2-3 YEARS OLD:

• Your child will understand simple stories.

• Your child will learn to count to three and understand what those numbers mean.

3-5 YEARS OLD

• Your child should be able to answer questions like: “What do you do when you are sleepy or hungry?” and learning to self-regulate, as their emotional development is moulded through pretend-play. These are all important skills needed to navigate childhood and adolescence. When we facilitate and build healthy creative minds, we are building an appreciation for their own design, and thus the design of others.

• Beginning to learn and understand different basic shapes and colours.

• Your child will, by age five, know how to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

• You will begin to teach your child the difference between right and wrong.

• Your child will have a difficult time knowing the difference between reality and fantasy during this period.

• Playing pretend will ready your child for reading. If a rock can “be” an egg, then a group of letters can stand for a word.

Toys in this category include loose toy parts, with no particular one-play function, such as blocks or wooden peg people, which makes play versatile.

PUSH/PULL TOYS

With our toddlers learning to navigate their first steps independently, push/pull toys make for great gifts! They’re awesome for helping our toddlers strengthen core muscles, and improve balance and co-ordination as they learn to walk independently.

As these physical skills are encouraged, their confidence to explore and take on tasks independently is boosted too, which creates a sense of positive self-esteem.

They also learn a great deal of spatial awareness by navigating their environments and pushing or pulling toys in the desired direction. Spatial awareness is a great building block for mathematics. My son still loves his push-walker at 20 months old, which has a shape-sorter with sound in the front and builds his thinking and problem-solving skills.

Push/pull toys with multipurpose functionality that grows with your child are all the better to invest in.

SENSORY-PLAY

This is one of our favourite ways to boost brain development and sensory processing. We can get through lots of basic concepts just by using sensory bins with popcorn seeds, coloured rice or lentils. (Don’t forget to monitor, especially when the contents are not taste-safe.)

Sensory toys can range from musical toys to various sensory bins and have endless benefits for boosting brain functioning. The stimulation is a great way to feed into the natural built-in inclination our kids have to explore and master the world around them. They become aware, learn to problem-solve and nerve connections in the brain’s neural pathways are built to master motor and processing skills needed within the environment.

Sensory toys are also an effective way to start building the self-regulation skills and emotional intelligence that are usually only mastered in adulthood, as they can have a great calming effect on the brain’s sensory processors. What makes this such a win is the ability to build memory skills –what appeals to the senses is bound to cause an emotional response, and thus memory is built. It’s important to observe your child’s unique sensory tolerance – as some children may have a low threshold and are more sensitive to sensory stimuli, while others have a high threshold and require a lot more input to be stimulated at all.

ACTIVITY-BOARDS

Activity boards can be filled with sensory items or fine-motor lock-and-key items. It’s an awesome way to learn about cause and effect as they pull, clip, tug and open/close items on the activity board, which lays the foundation for developing curious minds and intentional play.

Activty boards are also amazing concentration and attention boosters and the right type of activity board can really keep toddlers busy for quite a while, giving them a chance to develop those problem-solving connections and fine-motor skills.

Books

Books are a brilliant way to feed imagination, develop communication connections and increase vocabulary. From textured books to pop-up books, reading these aloud together facilitates a sense of co-operation and builds socio-emotional awareness, a component to adolescent emotionalintelligence.

There are endless opportunities to expand on lifethemes and create category connections from 2D to the real world.