Contents

Learning and development 3 to 4 years

Personal, Social and Emotional Development

I will need help to understand; and learn how to manage my emotions. I want to feel positive about myself and develop my self-confidence. I will learn about my body and work out how to manage my personal needs, all by myself. I need help to make and learn about healthy choices. I would like lots of friends and learn skills so I can play and work with others harmoniously.

Building Relationships: Help me learn how to form relationships with others:

  • Let me build things with my friends using big cardboard boxes and pieces of fabric

Managing Self: Help me to be healthy, feel good and learn about myself

  • Let me help you match the socks together, if they match and I do well, can you let me know so I can feel good about helping you
  • Can you let me help with tasks like cleaning the table or setting out the plates at lunch time?

Self-Regulation: Learning and feeling emotions:

  • Let me try and dress myself or dress up and pretend to be a nurse, doctor, firefighter, mum/ mummy or dad/ daddy/ papa
  • Explain to me why I cannot do things like run around the supermarket
  • Help me to understand why I feel sad, frustrated and the ways I can overcome this, like talking about what makes me sad or ways I can stop being frustrated
  • Show me how you manage your feelings, e.g. if you are finding something difficult, explain that you will try doing it in a different way

Physical Development:

Help me to be happy, healthy and active. I need you to support me to develop my muscles and learn through my senses, so I am strong and able to balance and co-ordinate my body. I need to play indoors and outdoors so I can use all my muscles. Later on, my fine motor control will become more skilled so I can be more precise and develop my hand-eye co-ordination to help with my writing when I get to school.

Big and little skills to develop muscles and body control:

 

  • Let me practise using children’s scissors to cut dough, cooked spaghetti or paper
  • Play games with me like football, basketball or throwing balls into bowls or boxes
  • Make an obstacle course in the park or garden where I have to run around benches or chairs, crawl under a blanket and crawl through a cardboard box, jump over logs, climb and swing
  • What about is we walk or scoot to the shops, childminders or nursery?

Communication and Language

Help me to develop my speaking (my home language or signing is important too) as this is important for all areas of learning and in later life. I will be talking lots and lots and will enjoy interesting conversations. I will love learning new words, learning rhymes and songs and I will really benefit from you reading stories to me regularly, so I hear and learn lots of new words.

Listening, attention and understanding:

  • Play listening games with me like “Simon Says…” Where I have to copy an action or play “Ready, Steady, Go” where I have to wait to push the ball or car
  • Make up silly sentences with me where each word begins with the same sound as at the start of my name, Daniel drives a digger with his dog eating doughnuts!
  • When I’m helping you to make lunch, ask me questions like “What do I need to cut the apple?” or “What do I need to pour your milk / water into?” so that I can find you the thing we need
  • When we’re tidying up give me simple instructions like “Put your shoes in the basket” or “Put the remote control on the sofa.”

Speaking:

  • Talk to me about things we did or places that we went to yesterday or what we might be doing tomorrow
  • Have conversations with me, talk about things that I find interesting and remember to show interest by nodding and making comments so we can keep the conversation going
  • Ask me where I may like to visit and why
  • Introduce new words when we are out and about, or playing. Can you explain the meaning of new words so I can start to use them?
  • Have a look at the communication checker to see if I’m on track

Literacy

Help me to develop my speaking (my home language or signing is important too) as this is important for all areas of learning and in later life. I will be talking lots and lots and will enjoy interesting conversations. I will love learning new words, learning rhymes and songs and I will really benefit from you reading stories to me regularly, so I hear and learn lots of new words.

Understanding and Comprehension

  • Can we talk about the story and what’s happening in the pictures?
  • Can we make up gobblefunk words and listen to words that rhyme?
  • Let me choose my own books when we go to the library, and collect free magazines from the shops
  • Show me the recipe as we’re making dough
  • Borrow a story sack from nursery/ childminder for us to investigate, read, and make up stories

Word reading

  • Read signs to me when we are out and about, on lorries or shop fronts
  • Let me read and share my books with you
  • Set up a pretend shop where I can read the labels on the packets and boxes

Writing

  • Tell me what you’re writing as you write a shopping list
  • Let me help make a name card for my bedroom door or a placemat with my name on. Let me use these and help me try to write my name by myself
  • Can I help write messages in cards for the family?

Mathematics

To support my mathematical skills, I need opportunities to practise counting confidently. I need to understand the quantity of each number; and the patterns within those numbers. I can use lots of objects to help me understand quantity - small pebbles, cars, raisins, small bricks, they all help me to organise my counting and explore number patterns (1+4 is also the same as 3+2). Can you provide opportunities for me to develop my spatial reasoning skills? - Exploring lots of shapes and how they fit together, patterns and position; and using mathematical language, helps me to learn spatial awareness.

Numbers

  • Give me lots of opportunities to count for a real reason like when we are shopping or at the park, collecting stones, or counting out the biscuits! “We have 4 bananas in the basket”. “we have 2 biscuits each”
  • Use plastic bottles to make skittles and ask how many I have knocked down emphasising, the last number
  • Let me build from cardboard boxes or wooden bricks. Use words like “long” or “tall” to describe my model

Numerical patterns

  • Can you cut out a large shape from a cardboard box (triangle/ square), then cut it into 2-4 pieces so we can use it as a puzzle and put it back together again?
  • Go on a shape or pattern walk inside or outside to find things which are the same like “circles” or “spheres”, “stripes”, “wavy lines”
  • Can you help me use words like up, under, over, between?

Understanding the World

Help me to understand the wider world and my community. Let’s visit parks, libraries and museums to meet important members of society such as police officers, nurses and firefighters. I will learn about the world by looking at a wide variety of stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems that will develop my understanding of our culturally, socially, technologically and ecologically diverse world. All of these experiences will help develop my knowledge and vocabulary which will later support my reading comprehension.

People, Culture and Communities

Past and Present

  • Let me press buttons, like on the pelican crossing or the doorbell at our friend’s house, to see what happens

Natural World

  • Let me explore mud, rain or snow, talk to me about how it changes and why? Why do puddles disappear, why does snow/ ice melt?
  • Help me collect interesting things like cones, leaves, shells and stones
  • Plant seeds with me in a pot or in the garden

Expressive Arts and Design

Can you provide me with regular opportunities to engage with the arts? By doing so, it helps me develop my imagination and creativity as I experience and play with a wide range of media and materials. By exploring arts, culture and theatre, what I see, hear and join in with helps to develop my understanding, self-expression and vocabulary, as well as appreciation of others.

Creating with Materials

  • Let me use my paints to mix up my own colours
  • Wrap up objects/ boxes using paper, scissors, string or sticky tape and have a party

Being Imaginative and Expressive

  • Join in with me and help me to use some of my toys to make up a story
  • Give me pieces of material to make a cape or a big cardboard box to make a spaceship so I can pretend to be somebody else or go on an adventure
  • Change the ending of stories or create new ideas

BBC's Tiny Happy People

Tiny Happy People can provide you with further ideas on how to help your child's brain development so they get the best start in life.

Visit 3 to 4 years old brain development on Tiny Happy People

Access songs and nursery rhymes on Tiny Happy People

For more information and ideas visit What to Expect When on the Foundation Years website.

For more ideas and resources visit literacy, reading and maths.

BBC TIny Happy People logo