The Thriving Threes! What communication and feeding milestones should your three year old be meeting?
Three years ago, your child was probably only months, weeks or even days old. Time has flown, and you shouldn’t only be amazed at your little one, but you should also be amazed and proud of yourself too! Parenting isn’t an easy task, and you need to recognise your achievement in raising this beautiful, little child.
Now, your child is likely to be learning the foundations of all of life’s essential skills by observing those around them; they are watching how you do the household chores, how you cook, shop and drive and how you interact with family and friends. They are hopefully transferring these activities and interactions into imaginary play, whilst playing ‘House’ or ‘Mums and Dads’. It is important that you are setting an example for your child, because they truly are absorbent little creatures, taking in all that they see and hear.
At the age of three, your child is on life’s eternal rollercoaster of emotions, experiences and development, and there are many exciting milestones to be reached. In ticking off these particular communication and feeding milestones, your child is preparing himself or herself for a life of functional and social interactions.
At SpeechEase Speech Therapy, we want to aid you in ticking off these milestones. As such, we have developed a list of what to expect from a three year old in areas such as social skills, communication and feeding.
Speech:
- Unfamiliar listeners should be able to understand most of what your three year old is saying.
- Your child’s sound inventory should continue to be expanding! Sounds that they should be saying include m, b, p, h, w, n, d, k, f and t.
Using Language:
- Your child should be increasingly able to talk about activities from their day.
- The ability to tell a story using up to four sentences at a time should be emerging. These sentences should be consisting of four or more words.
- Now, he or she should be able to respond to simple “who?”, “what?”, and “where?” questions, as well as asking “when?” and “how?” questions. We bet you thought you couldn’t get more questions than when your child was two!
- Your three year old should be using regular plurals (that is ‘ two dogs’, but not an irregular plural such as ‘two sheep’), as well as using pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘we’.
Understanding Language:
- Your three year old should understand the names of some shapes and colours, and as such, he or she should have the emerging ability to verbally identify them.
- As well as independently using regular plurals and pronouns, your child should understand them when you are talking to them.
Feeding:
- Your child should be eating a wide range of solid foods.
- He or she should be almost completely independent with self feeding.
If you have any queries about your child’s speech, language or feeding development, feel free to call SpeechEase Speech Therapy on 0423 334 144 to have a chat about your concerns and book in an appointment.
P.S. Keep an eye out on our next two blogs covering the exciting years of being a four and five year old!!