Child development at 2 years old: games, activities, exercises.

A small child can be compared to a piece of clay: whatever you mold from it is how it will grow. That is why the development of a child should be addressed from early childhood, especially since at this age children are very malleable, inquisitive, and quickly and happily learn everything new. Specialists at the Karkusha Early Development Center tell us how to do this correctly when a child is 2 years old.

Features of this age

Surely every mother or father has already noticed that the child’s coordination has improved significantly, the baby very rarely falls “out of the blue,” and games have become much more meaningful. It's time to introduce the baby to toys - sorters, a large construction set, a pyramid. Large magnetic puzzles and wooden games for learning shapes and colors are perfect for developing motor skills in children aged 1-2 years.

A feature of the development of a 2-year-old child is the improvement of logical thinking. The baby is actively exploring the world, he is interested in finding solutions to various problems on his own, and his favorite pastime is helping his family with household chores. It is important to support the baby in this endeavor, allow him to help with vacuuming, washing dishes, and choosing his own clothes according to the weather. Even if such help resembles pampering, in the future you won’t have to force the baby to collect toys and things.

Surely the first toys have already been broken and disassembled - the child is interested in the question “how does it work.” The technique arouses great curiosity; it is recommended to tell the child as much as possible, show simplified diagrams and cards.

Football is great for physical development. Kicking a ball with your daughter or son in the yard is an excellent training for your sense of space, physical endurance, accuracy, and coordination. Let such development of a child at just 2 years old seem unnecessary or strange to you, but research shows that already at this age, it is versatile activities that are useful. Today we kick a ball, tomorrow there will be modeling, the day after tomorrow we learn to draw, the next day we glue the first appliqués.

Advice: Your calm, diligent baby is about to become a bully and begin to say “no” to everything. The three-year crisis is approaching. Daily varied activities will help both you and your baby get through this difficult time much more smoothly.

Finger toys

Finger toys in the form of fairy-tale characters and animals are sold in stores; you can knit them yourself, if possible. The finger theater will amuse the baby and create the atmosphere of a fairy tale, the main character of which will be your baby. In a playful way, he will gain an understanding of simple human concepts and principles: time, environment, good, evil, strength, weakness, courage. The game allows children to explore the world around them. This way you can learn counting, the alphabet, the concepts of “right” and “left”. Develops imagination, concentration, attention, perseverance and abstract thinking. The child learns to relate himself to the heroes of the fairy tale and choose which hero he likes. The psycho-emotional component of the child’s inner world develops. By taking such a finger theater with you for a walk or to the clinic, you can avoid whims and have an interesting time.

What should a child be able to do by the age of two?

Most often, the level of development of a 2-year-old child allows him to run quite quickly, climb stairs, and easily overcome low obstacles. Many children are particularly “climbing” in this period of life, and don’t feed them bread, let them climb somewhere higher.

From games, complex buildings made from cubes are perfectly mastered: towers, pyramids, structures that are strange for adults, reminiscent of fortresses. The pyramid should also be well studied. The child should be able to easily assemble it from the larger ring to the smaller one. Games with the ball become more mature: the child catches it with both hands, knows how to kick and throw it in the right direction.

Games take on a plot; this is especially easy to understand if you watch a child in a group. The baby prepares lunches in the sandbox, feeds toys, and may try to feed his peers. The baby should already be able to drink and eat on his own, without excessive waste of food from a spoon. It is better for the development of the child, by 1.5 or 2.5 in extreme cases, to seat him for lunch at a small children's table. This is a great start to preparing for kindergarten.

What else should a child be able to do:

provide age-appropriate help around the house;
be able to use not only a spoon, but also a fork;
understand and respond to requests, stories, questions, suggestions;
ask questions when parents read books or show cartoons;
know most body parts of yourself, others, animals;
know at least 100 words and pronounce them; Slightly poor pronunciation is acceptable at this age;
make short sentences;
use the pot for needs;
be able to study with cards, books, pronounce words after adults;
know animal sounds;
try to draw, distinguish between several colors;
knows what “impossible” and “dangerous” are.

Tip: Your baby is active. To prevent flat feet, it is recommended to purchase special massage mats and place them in the place where the baby runs most often during the day. For example, in the corridor. If you are passionate about handicrafts, such a rug is easy to make yourself: buttons, beads, pieces of fabric of various densities, and caps from felt-tip pens are sewn onto thick fabric. These rugs are recommended for use from 1.5 years.

Art as a way to grow intellect

Today's surrounding world is full of music and painting, there are many theaters and ballets. It is art that can help in the intellectual development of your child. From childhood, your baby should be taught:

Music. It is very useful to listen to classical music with your child, which enlightens the soul and consciousness. Along with music, you can tell interesting stories and fairy tales. Add to this some funny children's songs. He will be happy to sing along with you. Learn the sense of rhythm with your child using special training programs, for example, the Zheleznovs’ program. Praise him for trying to dance.
Drawing. The drawings of a child from 1 to 5 years old are very different from each other. But it is precisely in a 2-year-old child that the art is not yet impressive, but it is no longer just chaotically painted paper. That's already something. At this age, children can already draw various figures and try to imitate loved ones and relatives. In these drawings, the coloring practically does not go beyond the boundaries. Play with him this way. You can draw a specific picture and ask to continue to complete the composition. For drawing, you can use both regular pencils and gouache.
Role-playing games. Such activities are also very useful for the intellectual development of children. You just need to interest him and play along, since basically they can come up with a scenario for such a game on their own, for example, a game of shopping or a doctor-patient game, etc. It is advisable that your child always have the main role, for example, you are a patient , and the child is a doctor. If your child has an older brother or sister, he can join you or study with him independently.

Experienced parents practice classes with children every week on a specific topic. It is necessary to involve the child in discussing various situations that occur near him. Never reproach your child for giving the wrong answer, always praise him when he answers correctly.

Physical development

For the physical correct development of a child at 2 years old, there are hundreds of recommendations, disputes about which will never subside. We recommend, first of all, that you closely monitor your child:

If your baby runs, jumps a lot, and loves outdoor games, your only task is to provide him with the conditions for this. Walk more, come up with fun games, do morning exercises in the morning.
If the baby is a leisurely child who prefers calmer games, then you can choose games that will simultaneously train him and not push him away with excessive activity. On the street you can collect pine cones or flowers in a basket, walk back and forth along the curb, or play tag.

Advice: In 100 cases out of 100, the child is infected by the parents’ lifestyle. If you prefer to spend extra time sitting at the computer or with a phone in your hand, rest assured that your child will love what you love. If mom and dad do exercises, jogging and don’t have bad habits, this will also become a standard of life behavior for the baby. The bad parent is the one who demands from the child what he himself does not do.

Laptop, phone, tablet

Most families with small children cannot live without a laptop, tablet, or phone. All kids love to watch cartoons, and often it takes not 15-20 minutes, but two to three hours a day. This regime negatively affects the development of a two-year-old child as a whole. First of all, watching cartoons on a computer blocks the development of speech due to the noise effect created, secondly, it creates a stressful situation for the child’s mental state due to flashing pictures and again noise, and thirdly, it causes aggression and whims. WHO pediatricians recommend that children under three years of age should not watch television, laptops, or tablets. In fact, it is very difficult, almost impossible, to implement this in real life, but it is still necessary to minimize the child’s viewing of cartoons. This will be the key to a healthy psyche, rapid development of speech and a calm growing up of the child without hysterics and whims, to the delight of the parents.

Exercises and games for physical development at 2 years old

We recommend several games for a 2-year-old child for physical development, mental training and mobility:

Draw on cards or print out pictures and scatter apples, mushrooms, berries on the floor and collect them with your child. Be sure to pronounce the names of all objects in the pictures. This exercise will not only force the baby to squat and bend over, but will also enrich his vocabulary.
We repeat after the animals. Show your child how a snake crawls, how an ostrich runs, how a cat, how an elephant. The space here is enormous. Do not hesitate to show by example and forgive your child to repeat.
On the street, walk more on objects: on the parallel bars on the sports ground, along curbs. Modern playgrounds provide space for children's games and development. There are horizontal bars, ladders, a climbing wall, tunnels, and much more.
Games with fitball are a great workout not only for adults, but also for children. It’s fun to jump on it; you can make an analogy with a trampoline, if an adult presses it with his knees to the sofa or into the corner of the walls, and, supporting the child, lets him jump to his heart’s content.

Studying the properties of objects

There are many educational programs for 2 year olds. One of the most necessary is the study of the properties of objects. Your child is constantly around some things. If he knows the properties of these objects, he knows what to do with them. Such games promote the development of abstract thinking. The learning process is fascinating and the child needs to learn:

general concepts about the subject - long and short, high and low, wide and narrow;
understanding what an object feels like - warm and cold, rough and smooth, etc.;
light and heavy;
taste and smell;
shapes of geometric figures: square, triangle, etc.

Sensory development

For sensory development in children 2-3 years old, sensory boxes are ideal for use. To make such a simulator, you need to allocate a large container that can be filled with colored cereals, orbiz (this is a hydrogel that is not expensive, but its benefits are enormous), and sand. Stores offer an abundance of various fillers for sensory boxes: orbiz can be bought at a flower shop, ordered from China, or looked for in children's stores. You can buy kinetic sand or “smart” modeling clay. Give your child such a box, a couple of small molds, spatulas and a rake, bury new small toys in the filling and the child will be busy for a good 20-40 minutes.

Games for the sensory development of a 2-year-old child - space for the imagination of moms and dads. Be sure to let your baby participate in cooking. Show the potato in the skin, let him touch it, then peel it and give it to the child again. Then cut - again let's feel the pieces. Such a simple, everyday thing, but its effectiveness is amazing.

Also an excellent training tool would be a bag where you can put toys of different shapes and sizes and ask the child to take out first the large one, then the medium one, the rough one, the soft one, and so on. Modern special books for children can become a wonderful simulator for developing tactile sensations. In such books, for example, a tiger is shown on the page, and there is an insert with artificial tiger fur. You can touch it and study it. Such books cause wild delight in children.

Reading children's books

Young children from two to three years old quickly remember colorful, voluminous information. Therefore, a small supply of large-sized children's books will always be useful. Books laid out in the room will encourage the baby to look at the funny illustrations, and reading to the mother will cause calm and interest. By explaining pictures and showing letters, the mother develops the baby’s attention and horizons, and natural and life phenomena become clear to him. Reading is one of the most effective and educational methods of learning for children aged two to three years.

Fine motor skills

For the development of fine motor skills in children 2 years old, large buttons, colored pasta, and sensory boxes, which we already discussed a little higher, are suitable. Give your child a string and a handful of colored pasta and show him how to make fancy beads if you have a girl and a bunch of gun cartridges if you have a boy.

Massage is perfect for finger development. Gently massage each finger in turn and play magpie-crow. Try to teach your child to fasten his own buttons as soon as possible. Speech therapists advise giving your child buckwheat mixed with rice or peas. It is not necessary for the child to do this for 20 minutes. 5-7 minutes is enough.

Games that develop fine motor skills:

modeling with plasticine, clay, salt dough;
It is useful to stick plasticine or paste onto stencils and drawings;
appliques, working with scissors - an excellent simulator;
games with clothespins, clamps;
games with cereals, busy boards;
putting together puzzles, sorting out magnets of different shapes on the refrigerator;
The new magnetic construction set performed well.

Tip: How to color cereals or pasta? Dissolve food coloring in 3-6 ml of water in a container. Add cereal or pasta. Gently shake and scatter on a table covered with cling film or a bag to dry for 10 hours.

The more independent a child is, the less likely it is that a child will be developmentally delayed at 2 years of age. Allow him to do everything that is not dangerous to his health and well-being. If a baby climbs a hill, it is better to insure than to prohibit it. If he wants to help clean up, give him a broom or vacuum cleaner. If your hands reach for the food cupboard, pour a couple of handfuls of cereal into the container and tell them how to cook the porridge. Everything is important for finger motor skills: every movement trains the fingers in one way or another, develops muscles and tenacity.

The importance of online games for children

You can study at home and on the computer. Another good option is an online educational program for kids. Children 2−4 years old will find it especially useful and interesting to study on a computer. But the main thing here is that their duration does not exceed 10-15 minutes. For example, tasks such as “find a pair” or “pick up an object.”

Additionally, you can offer games such as collecting pictures, coloring, putting together puzzles, finding extra objects , etc. Such games are not difficult for a 2-year-old child, but the brightness of computer animation is very addictive and interesting. In order for such games to actually be useful for a child, you need to practice with him constantly. It is important to be patient with the child, and this will bring huge benefits in his development.

Musical and creative development

The scope for such activities is so diverse that they are limited only by the imagination of mom and dad. To train musical development, it is better for mother to sing songs and cradle songs more often. You can play musical cartoons for your child. Children from 1 year old love music books and toys. It is useful to dance together to fast music and slow music. Learning a dance has a good effect on memory and develops hearing. You can also find and download sounds of nature on the Internet, print out pictures and tell how a bear screams, how a wolf howls, how the sea roars, and so on.

There are a lot of interesting activities for the creative development of a 2-year-old child:

Paint with finger paints. Cover the floor with newspapers and place whatman paper in the center. It is better to put your baby in home clothes and indulge in joint creativity without fear that the baby will ruin the clothes.
Sharpen shavings from wax crayons. Ask your child to arrange the shavings on a sheet of paper the way he likes. Place another sheet on top, cover with a cloth and iron. Then open the creation and decorate your wall or refrigerator with it.
Freeze the water and dyes in ice cube trays by inserting a toothpick or matchstick into each cube. Drawing with ice is an amazing, interesting leisure activity.
Modeling, appliques, crafts from leaves and flowers, salt dough - all this will help the creative development of children aged 2-3 years.

Tip: To make safe finger paints, mix vegetable oil, flour or starch and water to create a gouache consistency. Add dyes and pour into jars.

Non-traditional art activities

Many people have heard about finger painting, drawing on wet paper, grain, sand, candles, monotype, etc., but only a few know that this is a new and effective teaching method that will be especially interesting for kids. It is non-traditional, so teaching a child involves the use of specific techniques and a variety of non-standard materials for visual activities.

Intellectual abilities are developed with the help of blotography: a small pebble is immersed in watercolor, the baby puts a blot on the paper, and the mother asks: “What does it look like? To the cloud? Or a car, if we draw wheels for it?”, thereby making up a whole plot.
The child will learn to draw with a candle with interest: the wax is not visible on white paper, but if you moisten the cotton wool with paint and apply it to the image, a picture will suddenly appear before his eyes.
But here is the monotype method: use bright finger paints (thick gouache), transparent cellophane and paper. The child draws an image on the cellophane with his hand filled with paint, then the cellophane is turned over and placed on the paper, resulting in two vague drawings at once. "What is this? Maybe a forest and a river?

Speech development of a child

Speech development of a child at 2 years of age is an extremely important stage of development. Every day, the vocabulary should be constantly replenished; books, pictures for the development of speech of a two-year-old, cartoons are helpful, but the main thing is communication with family and friends.

Speech therapy gymnastics, exercises for speech development in children 2 years old:

Hippo. For this simple speech muscle exercise, ask your child to open his mouth wide, as if he were a hippopotamus. Count to five and close your mouth. Repeat 3-5 times.
Frog frog. Smile as hard as you can, tensing your facial muscles, then relax and repeat again. 3-5 times will be enough.
Snake. Smile and quickly stick out your tongue. The faster the better. Repeat 3-5 times.
Tongue comb. This exercise acts as a massage for the tongue. Stick out your tongue, clench your teeth and pull the tongue back, as if “combing” it. Repeat several times a day 3-5 times.
Watch. Smile with your mouth open, alternately touching the corners of your mouth with your tongue. Enough 5 times on each side.
Ball cheeks. Inflate your cheeks one by one, 5 times on each side.

These exercises are recommended by speech therapists to prevent delayed speech development in children over 2 years old. By doing them every day, inventing your own exercises, and training the muscles of your face and neck, you will not encounter articulation problems. If a child likes to do exercises that develop speech, if he wants to play more, you should not prohibit him. The more often and more classes, the better.

Signs that there is a delay in speech development in a child at 2 years old:

there are few words in the baby’s everyday life;
prefers to communicate with gestures;
there is no imitation of adult speech.

If a child by this age is still silent, or speaks very poorly and speaks little, this is a reason to immediately visit a neurologist and start classes with a speech therapist.

Sample lesson plan for the week:

Watching how a child grows and develops, do not forget that each baby is an individual. You may not always like his talents and features. Give your child space for his own opinion, to express himself, and your child will answer you only with love.

Puzzles

Another interesting game for a two-year-old child will be puzzles. Large puzzles with a small number of details and simple bright pictures are suitable for younger children. To put the picture together, the baby will need the help of an adult. You should join the holes with the convex parts of the picture slowly, explaining to the child what signs are used to determine the parts that match each other. As soon as the baby understands the essence of the game, he will independently carry out this procedure, repeatedly assembling and disassembling the parts. After all, playing puzzles is such an exciting entertainment that even adults enjoy!