Your Child's Development: 36 and 48 Months

Motor

• 36 months: Walks upstairs alternating feet, catches a big ball, kicks big ball, jumps forward, hops, copies circle, cuts paper, can unbutton buttons.
• 48 months: Skips and hops; rides tricycle; catches and bounces ball; holds pencil or crayon and copies six simple shapes, such as a line or a circle; shows hand preference; strings beads.

• 36 months and 48 months: Enjoys or tolerates various types of touch (cuddling, roughhousing, different types of clothing, brushing teeth or hair); is comfortable with loud sounds, bright lights, and movement in space.

• 36 months: Understands and constructs logical bridges between ideas with full sentences; uses but and because; answers who, what, and where questions; comprehends actions/verbs; uses plurals; uses two prepositions.
• 48 months: Comprehends complex why questions such as "Why do we need a house?"; can express ideas reflecting an understanding of relative degrees of feelings or wishes or intentions ("I am only a little mad"); can repeat a five- to ten-word sentence; can repeat four to seven random numbers.

• 36 months: Pretend play has logical structure to it (pretend ideas are connected); spatial designs are complex and interrelated (a house made of blocks has connected rooms); child identifies "big" and "little" as part of developing a quantitative perspective; can identify objects by their function as part of developing abstract groupings.
• 48 months: Can point to pictures of objects in answer to questions such as "What do you eat with?" or "What makes food hot?"); can deal with concepts of quantity ("Which is biggest?" "Which box has more marbles?"); can identify similarities and differences in shapes and verbal concepts (triangle vs. rectangle, people vs. animals); can recall and comprehend experiences from recent past.

More on: Learning Activities for Preschoolers

Excerpted from:

Copyright © 1999 by Stanley I. Greenspan. Excerpted from Building Healthy Minds: The Six Experiences That Create Intelligence And Emotional Growth In Babies And Young Children with permission of its publisher, Perseus Books Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

To order this book visit perseusbooksgroup.com.