10 Tips to Get Your Tot Talking

3-year-olds use language to express their needs, feelings, and thoughts. They like to talk, and they like others to hear them.

Curious and communicative with the world around them, 3-year-olds start to understand and answer questions. They also like to ask questions about the experiences they encounters, like ducks in the park.

3-year-olds are beginning to speak in complete sentences and follow grammar rules.

With an increased vocabulary of 4,000 to 6,000 words, 4-year-olds usually speak in 5 to 6 word sentences.

Learning so many words at a time, 4-year-old children often misuse words and mislabel objects. Children may mislabel a shopping cart a stroller or a baby carriage.

4-year-olds are just learning verb tenses, plurals and pronouns. They often extend language rules without incorporating language exceptions. “Went” is “goed,” “kept” is “keeped,” and “children” is “childs.”

Excited to talk and be heard, 4-year-olds often have difficulty letting others speak. Teach your child how to listen to others and take turns speaking.

Speaking with more words in a sentence and with more complex sentence structures, 5-year-old children's vocabularies expand to 5,000 to 8,000 words.

5-year-olds learn to listen to others, take turns speaking, and interrupt less frequently. "Show and Tell" allows children to take turns speaking and listening to a group.

Learning difficult vocabulary for topics of interest is not uncommon. A 5-year-old who loves dinosaurs may know the words “Stegosaurus” and “Tyrannosaurus Rex."