As your child’s personality blossoms, they become more able to make up their own games and play on their own.

How your child is developing

Your child is now a ‘pre-schooler’ and their personality is blossoming. They can play on their own without making sure you’re always near and their powerful imagination allows them to dream up absorbing games by themselves.

You may find your child is more aware of what other children are doing and tries to copy them. They may attempt to join in games and feel rebuffed if excluded.

Studies show that even at this age, children have quite strong ideas about what makes a ‘girl’s toy’ and a ‘boy’s toy’, even in homes where parents have taken care to avoid stereotyping.

What you can do

Make different types of toys available to your child and don’t forbid boys to play with dolls or girls to play with cars and trucks. Also, don’t allow anyone to comment – or worse, laugh or criticise – if they see this happening.

Children of this age need scope and space to run wild. Play outdoors in a safe place whenever possible, so your child can meet physical challenges and enjoy overcoming them.

Provide some challenges yourself. Ask your child how many times can they hop on one leg, for example, or if they can walk along a low wall without wobbling.

Fun and games

Imagination allows your child to create a world in which they are powerful and grown up, and where they can direct the action. These ideas can help to encourage them:

• Throw a tablecloth over a couple of chairs to make a tent, house, shop or hideaway
• Play pizza delivery, with a toy phone to place orders and you as the customer and your child as the delivery person (then vice versa)
• Put together a dressing-up box with old clothes (especially hats, bags and shoes), old curtains as capes for superheroes, kings and queens, and net curtains as brides’ veils
• Make a shop from a collection of motley items and toys, arranged on a mat or a table, with you (and teddies and dolls) as customers
• Make a TV from a cardboard box so your child can stage a show
• Go on the web with your child, find a recipe site with pictures, and choose together what you like the look at.

Toys to buy

Your child enjoys pretend play more than ever before. You can support it with scaled-down grown-up equipment.

Toy suggestions:

• Play kitchen, with accessories
• Tea set – invite all the toys to tea (use plain water)
• Tool set – helps to encourage fine motor skills and teach simple engineering and design
• Play house or play tent – can become anything, from a restaurant or shop to a office, hospital or school
• Doll’s house, fairy castle, pirate ship or play garage – can become the scene for a thousand little plays produced, directed and scripted by your child

Let your child make bread bun pizzas by spreading the buns with tomato paste, sprinkling on grated cheese and arranging some olives on top – you can then heat the buns under the grill for a minute or so

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Children this age love to ask questions and explore, which means you can play games that develop understanding of science and maths.

How your child is developing

Pre-school children are curious about the world, how it works and why, and they love to investigate and explore.

All this ties in with their growing understanding of the world, and the knowledge they’re a separate person, with feelings and experiences different from other people’s. They know that if something happens to them when you’re not there, you won’t know about it and they’ll have to explain it to you.

Explanations are part of early science and maths – and investigations are ways children of this age test out ideas and come to conclusions. Early-years teachers create stimulating and challenging environments that use this questing and questioning stage to make learning rewarding and fun.

What you can do

Welcome your child’s questions even if they’re difficult to answer – “Where is the air”, “Why does grass grow green?” or “Why does grandma have lines on her face?”

Come up with questions of your own. Help your child to flex their thinking muscles by seeing if they can guess how life would be different if they were very tall or lived in a tent, or in a very cold (or hot) place.
See if they can solve simple problems – “If I have a pet lion and you have two pet lions, how many lions do we have together?”

Make things light-hearted. If they find the answers easy, make the questions more difficult.
Fun and games

Early science and maths games need minimal equipment.

Take a jam jar with you on a walk to the park, and find a snail to bring home and look at. Afterwards, release it somewhere safe such as a garden.

At bath time, place different containers in the bath and see how many cups of water can fit in a jug or bowl. Ask your child to guess how many it will take. Also experiment with which objects float and which don’t.
Growing cress from seeds is easy – they’ll grow on any surface that’s kept moist. Put cotton wool inside an egg shell and grow green ‘hair’. You can even draw facial features on the shell.

Practise counting by predicting how many steps it will take to walk down the garden or to the shops or bus stop.

Ask your child to set the table for tea. That means putting out the same number of plates, knives and cups. Let them count and get the right number.

Toys to buy

Budding scientists don’t need much more than their own environment and your support to keep them busy, but you can top this up with the right toys.

• Good quality magnifying glass for studying insects, plants and the natural world
• Gardening kit of lightweight tools that really work
• Sand box or tray, for modelling and experimenting with shape and substance
• Bird table for observations and to feed the birds in winter (make bird cake by mixing seeds, dried fruit and nuts into melted lard, then leave it to set in the fridge in an old yoghurt pot)
• Board games with numbered squares for counting

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How your child is developing

In the first years of primary school, your child becomes an ever more confident communicator, artist, scientist, mathematician, reader and writer. If they experience problems in any of these areas, they’ll be offered help and possibly professional guidance and support

They have the understanding to recognise when they can use strategies – including cheating – to manipulate the outcomes and results of games. You may see the first strong signs of any competitive nature.

What you can do

Give your child plenty of opportunities to develop independence and take responsibilities. Organising their belongings and tidying up can be made into a game if you time it right. It can even support early maths, which starts with ordering items and sorting them into categories.

Many children of this age prefer friends of their own gender – part of a growing realisation that humans are male or female, and they’re one or the other

Don’t insist on formal learning too heavily. Some schools may give ‘homework’ as early as five or six (prescriptive reading tasks, for instance) and if your child resists or seems too tired to comply, remember there are other ways to learn through play, conversation and observation.
When your child wants to find something out, or asks a question you can’t answer, help him or her use the internet as a research tool

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