Your rapidly growing preschooler

A natural artist
Children love making cards for birthdays, Mother's Day, or other special occasions. As your child's memory improves, she'll be ready for a scrapbook to collect mementos and create something special that gives her an opportunity to reflect on her experiences.

Your child's ability to draw and paint will improve as he progresses from scribbling to representing people and objects. Let him try both freehand drawing and controlled drawing using stencils. You may be fascinated to see the feelings and experiences your child expresses through his art.

Games and reading
Board games provide an opportunity to play with your child and to help her recognize numbers and count. She will want to be able to read the number of dots on dice to help her figure out how many squares her piece has to move on the board at each roll of the dice.

Books and stories are a wonderful, entertaining way to develop a child's language skills and understanding. As she gets older, she'll be interested not only in the pictures but the story. Fairy tales, adventure stories, and nursery rhymes may all capture your child's interest. Some books help children prepare for big changes or events in their lives. These might deal with events like going to school, visiting a hospital, or the arrival of a new baby.

It's more important that your preschool child learn to appreciate books as a source of pleasure and enjoyment than that he be pressured into learning how to read before he's ready. Nonetheless, there are books, board games, and television programs that may help your child become familiar with the letters of the alphabet and learn to associate the shapes of letters with certain sounds. But puzzles like alphabet jigsaws or projects like making an alphabet scrapbook can make learning the letters much more fun. For the preschool child, playing is the best form of learning.

Your efforts to cultivate a love of learning in your child will pay more immediate and lasting dividends than drilling her on letters, numbers, or words. Encourage her natural curiosity and tendency to actively explore on her own. Making your child's "educational" experiences entertaining is the surest way to guarantee that she will be a successful learner. Take the play out of learning and you risk dulling your child's natural enthusiasm for learning. Keep the vital connection between playing and learning alive, and you won't have to worry about her willingness or ability to learn in the future.