Your Child’s Development 36-48 Months

Milestones: By 48 months, most children can:

• Catch a large ball.
• Unbutton some buttons.
• Hold a crayon between their fingers and thumb (not a fist).

Body Awareness and Control:

• Your child can use one sense to predict what they would perceive with another, such as touching a soft teddy bear with their eyes closed and knowing it is a stuffed animal.

Muscle Development and Coordination:

• Your child can balance while standing on one foot as well as standing firmly when they come to a stop after running.
• With supervision, your child can balance while walking on the edge of the sandbox and then jump off with both feet.
• Your child can walk up the stairs, one foot per step, without holding on to the railing or your hand for support.
• Your child will enjoy jumping up to touch things out of their reach.
• Your child can hop using both feet.
• They can jump like a frog from a squatting position.
• Your child can hop forward on one foot.
• Your child will enjoy playing games with other kids, such as Duck, Duck, Goose, or Red Light-Green Light.

Nutrition:

• Your child will try new foods and may take a few tries before deciding if they like a new food.

Basic Safety:

• Your child will enjoy climbing on things. You will need to decide what is safe for your child to climb on and remind them to climb on those things when they start climbing on other things.
• Your child can identify safety signs in the community, such as a red cross for a hospital or a blue police light.

Self-Care:

• Your child may be able to identify the need to use the bathroom and let you know.

Milestones: By 48 months, most children can:

• Say sentences with four or more words.
• Say some words from a song, story, or nursery rhyme.
• Talk about at least one thing that happened during their day.
• Answer simple questions.

Expressive Communication/Expressive Language:

• Your child can tell a story about their day.
• Your child will see other children’s body language and try to understand what they mean, such as understanding that a friend who has hands on their hips and is shaking their head “no” wants them to stop what they are doing.
• Your child will keep building their vocabulary, including more descriptive words.
• Your child can participate in conversations with others by giving responses that make sense for the topic being discussed. ‘

Receptive Communication/Receptive Language:

• Your child can understand most of what you say to them.
• Your child will like to learn big words like the names of certain trucks or dinosaurs.
• Emergent Reading:
• Your child may describe what’s happening in the pictures while turning the pages in a familiar book.
• Your child can ask and answer simple questions about a book when they are being read to.
• Your child can say what they like about a favorite book.
• Your child is learning that letters make words and that when different people read words, the words stay the same.
• Your child may love to read the same book many times.

Writing:

• Your child may pretend to write letters and words even before they know how to write actual letters.
• Your child is beginning to understand that people can use writing to give messages to other people.
• Having ready access to various drawing and writing tools and paper encourages children to use these tools to express themselves and communicate.

Milestones: By 48 months, most children:

• Compare and contrast objects and classify them based on different attributes.
• Learn to predict changes in materials and objects based on their knowledge and experience.

Inquiry and Exploration:

• Children persist in asking, “Why?”

Reasoning and Problem Solving:

• Children remember strategies that have worked and apply them to new situations. For example, at home, a child might move a stool to the sink so that he can reach for his toothbrush. At childcare the next day, he struggles to reach a pencil on the counter, so he picks up a chair and puts it near the counter.

Play:

• Children engage in pretend play that includes roles and experience that they find challenging. For example, after a visit to the doctor, a child gives her doll a shot.
• A child might invent stories and characters.
• Children might laugh at themselves when they do something silly.

Executive Function:

• Children can change plans to incorporate new materials.
• Children can play simple memory games such as matching pictures on cards.
• Children show initiative in a variety of ways, including offering to help.

Symbolic Representation:

• Children are aware that some symbols represent words and numbers. For example, a child sees a letter and says that’s D for Dean!

Tips to support cognitive skills:

• Suggest simple measuring tasks for your child. For example: “If we line up the cars, how many do you think we can fit on the edge of this table?”
• Try suggesting simple measuring tasks for your child. For example: “If we line up the cars, how many do you think we can fit on the edge of this table?”
• When you are outside or at the park, stop to look carefully at what is around you. Observe what your child is interested in and ask questions to encourage observation and reasoning. It might sound like this:
  • “Oh, you found a leaf. Where is another one that is the same as this one? Are there any leaves that are different?”
  • “See all the earthworms? We didn’t see them yesterday. Why do you think they came out today?”
  • When you are grocery shopping, asking for your child’s help might sound like this:
  • “Would you get three bananas?”
  • “How many potatoes do you think will fit in this bag? Shall we count them?”
  • “We have five people in our family. Would you get an apple for each person?”
  • “We need two pounds of peaches. Watch the scale to see when the needle points to two.”

Milestones: By 48 Months, most children:

• Count objects up to 10 or even higher and recognize written numbers.
• Identify and name basic shapes like circles, squares, and triangles, and start recognizing patterns, such as alternating colors or shapes in a sequence of beads or tiles.
• Compare sizes and understand concepts like “bigger,” “smaller,” “more,” and “less.”
• Sort objects by different attributes such as color, size, or type.
• Recognize or create planned or random repetitions and comparisons. For example, a child looks at plastic animals on the shelf and says, “Mommy, baby, mommy, baby.”
• Often tell which is more just by looking. If their friends have six blocks and they have two, they can let you know that their friend has more than they do.
• Begin to understand the concept of quantity and can match numbers to quantities, such as accurately putting three apples in a basket.

Upcoming Concepts:

• Your child might start to grasp basic addition and subtraction concepts through everyday activities. For example, if they have two cookies and you give them one more, they can tell you they now have three cookies.
• They may also begin to understand basic time concepts, such as “morning,” “afternoon,” and “night,” and the order of daily routines.
• Recognizing the days of the week and terms like “yesterday,” “today,” and “tomorrow” also start to make sense to them.

Tips for strengthening Number Sense skills:

• Involve your child in cooking by letting them count ingredients. For example, “Can you help me count three eggs?”
• Point to things as you count them so that children can see how each number you say represents one object.
• Count out loud so your children can hear the sequence of numbers, and notice how often you use counting in your day.

Asking questions not only helps with counting and basic math skills but also encourages children to think about the reasons behind their actions and observations, promoting deeper critical thinking.

• “If we read two bedtime stories tonight and one more tomorrow, how many stories will we have read? What if we read two each night for a week?”
• “Can you count how many stuffed animals are on your bed? If we add two more, how many will there be?”
• “Let’s count how many toys we need to put away. One, two, three…”
• “Can you put all the blue blocks in this bin and all the red blocks in that bin?”
• While out on a walk, ask, “How many dogs do you think we’ll see on our walk? Let’s count them together.”
• When cleaning up together, ask, “Let’s put all the red blocks in one pile and the blue blocks in another. Which pile has more blocks? Which has less?”