A world of their own

Jenny Benjamin
Wednesday, December 19, 2001

Choosing toys for the rising threes should take account of their language acquisition and development of imaginative role play. Jenny Benjamin offers some pointers As we have seen from the earlier articles in this series, children of two years old are already making sense of the complex world around them. Led by their natural curiosity, they have moved on from the gathering of sensory impressions to more elaborate investigations - finding out not just what things are, but what they do. They have also begun to recognise that things belong to groups or categories, and have started to reinforce this realisation by playing simple sorting games. These basically scientific activities - experimentation and classification - are pursued with gusto throughout the pre-school years. Indeed, once children learn to circumvent the discovery process by asking questions, their hunger for knowledge can begin to drive adults mad.