Children at this age often love to draw, which helps build the coordination they need to hold a crayon or pencil and begin to form letters.
Activities by Age for 3-Year-Olds
ON THIS PAGE
- Beginning Writing
- Letter Knowledge
- Oral Language
- Phonological Awareness
Blue Makes Me Think of ...
Drawing lets your child work on the coordination needed to hold a crayon, keep the paper still and apply enough pressure.
Fill the Tub
This fun activity will give your child a chance to practice pincer control as he pushes macaroni into the plastic lid of a container.
Marching Around the Letters
Get your child up and moving as you use music and movement to help your child practice writing letters.
My Cutting Kit
If you take the time to put together a Cutting Kit, it will encourage frequent and successful practice cutting with scissors, which will help your child develop fine motor skills for writing.
My Name!
This activity provides your child with failure-free practice in tracing her name. Writing her own name is empowering and is a step in believing she is a writer.
My Personal Cereal Book
This activity uses environmental print (words in our environment) to expose your child to print awareness.
Nuts and Bolts
In this activity, your child will practice the fine motor skills eventually needed for writing and drawing.
Sand Designs
Give your child fine motor practice in the sand with this fun, quick and simple activity.
Shaving Cream Shapes
In this activity, your child will have fun “fingerpainting” with shaving cream while learning about different shapes.
Sidewalk Writing
This activity provides a fun way for your child to practice her emerging drawing and writing skills outside.
The Write Time
This activity encourages you to start a file for your child’s writing to show progress over time.
Bottle Cap Fun
For this activity, you’ll need to start a collection of bottle caps of various colors and sizes for your child to examine and play with.
Color/Letter Sort
In this fun game, your child will improve her observational skills as she learns to distinguish letters.
Feel and Find
This activity lets your child learn to distinguish objects by touch, eventually moving on to plastic letters.
Find the Letter
This is a fun, active activity where your child will match a magnetic letter to an oversized letter written with sidewalk chalk.
Hop to the Letter
When your child won’t stop moving, use this fun activity to take advantage of that energy while building in a little alphabet knowledge.
Letter Monster
In this fun activity, your child will love feeding the letters of his name to the Letter Monster.
Letter Soup
In this activity, children will compare letter shapes as they learn the names of letters.
Match the Keys
In this activity, your child will have practice looking at the similarities and differences in keys, which will eventually help with identifying letters.
Sticks, Humps, Bumps, Curves and Circles
Play this sorting game to help your child learn about differences and similarities in letters.
The Search for Letters
This activity will give your child practice finding the letters in his name. Those are the letters that he will most likely learn first.
Walking the Tightrope Letters
In this activity, your child will walk in a straight line while learning about the letters in her name, giving her a chance to see the letters from different perspectives.
Being Silly
You can promote your child’s oral language skills by letting him “catch you” making an obvious mistake during everyday experiences.
Can You Find the Hidden Treasure?
Children love surprises! Hide an everyday item and it becomes a treasure to find.
I Wish I May
Build vocabulary and confidence in talking and sharing with a nursery rhyme.
In-The-Car Talk
This activity lets you turn a car ride into an opportunity to talk to your child and build oral language skills.
Obstacle Course
This game provides physical activity and practice in receptive language skills (following directions), number words and positional words.
Peek-A-Boo Feelings
This activity gives your child a simple way to recognize facial expressions and talk about feelings and emotions
Pick, Tell, Pretend, Sort
This activity is easy to assemble and is bound to give you some laughs while developing oral language skills at the same time.
Picture Toss
In this game, your preschooler will have fun identifying and naming objects while moving and laughing.
Shoe World
In this activity, your child will have fun trying on all sorts of shoes while learning to describe them.
Show Me
In this enjoyable game, you will be able to see your child’s progress in her understanding of spoken language.
Spoon Island
In this activity, your child will use homemade spoon characters to tell a story and practice oral language.
Rhyme Time Cleanup
Preschool children enjoy hearing and experimenting with rhymes. Next time you ask your child to clean up his toys, turn it into a fun rhyming game!
Body Beatbox
In this activity, your child will watch and hear you produce sounds with your hands, feet and voice and repeat what you’ve done.
Fruit Name Clap
In this activity, you will bring your child’s attention to the syllables that make up words.
Fun Rhyming With Books
In this activity, you’ll read books that have lots of rhyme and language repetition to help expose your preschooler to important phonological awareness skills in a fun and natural way.
Listen for the Super Word
In this fun activity, your child will be asked to listen for and act upon a super word.
Same Sound All Around
Make a game out of finding objects in your house that begin with the first letter of your child’s name.
Shopping for Sounds
Routine activities like food shopping provide a perfect way to introduce your child to the concept of beginning sounds while simultaneously checking a necessary item off your to-do list!
Sound Race
This activity combines motor skills in a fun way, allowing your child to practice listening for beginning sounds while getting some of that excess energy out.
What Is In … side the Box?
This fun game will help your little one listen carefully and discover that words can break apart into smaller sound units, or syllables.
What Would You Like Today?
Turn mealtimes into a game in which your child gets to choose what he’d like to eat by finishing the words you’ve slowly started saying.
Which Picture?
Here’s a fun, simple way to introduce your child to the different parts of words using pictures from a magazine and a few index cards.