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Developmental milestones-3 to 4 years
Physical development
- May no longer need a daytime nap
- Running, jumping, hopping, throwing, and catching become better coordinated
- Galloping and onefoot skipping appear
- Rides tricycle
- Uses scissors
- Draws first picture of a person
- Can distinguish writing from nonwriting
Cognitive development
- Masters dual representation
- Notices and reasons about transformations, reverses thinking, and understands causality in familiar situations
- Classifies familiar objects hierarchically
- Uses private speech to guide behavior in challenging tasks
- Attention becomes more sustained and planful
- Uses scripts to recall familiar experiences
- Understands that both beliefs and desires determine behavior
- Aware of some meaningful features of written language
- Counts small numbers of objects and grasps cardinality
Social and emotional development
- Begins to distinguish others’ intentional from unintentional acts
- Emotional self-regulation improves
- Experiences self-conscious emotions more often
- Nonsocial activity declines and interactive play increases
- Instrumental aggression declines, and hostile aggression increases
- Forms first friendships
- Distinguishes moral from social-conventional and personal matters
- Preference for same-sex playmates strengthens
Language development
- Masters increasingly complex grammatical structures
- Occasionally overextends grammatical rules to exceptions
- Understands many culturally accepted ways of adjusting speech to fit the age, sex, and social status of speakers and listeners
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