The development of a child's speech is a complex and crucial process, necessary for life and it enables us to communicate and understand each other. The first chapter of this paper explains the concept of speech and lists the two stages of speech according to Posokhovoj (1999): the preverbal stage and the verbal stage. The preverbal stage is considered to be the time before the child's production of the first meaningful word, while the verbal stage marks the use of a language, that is its everyday use and understanding. According to the authors Apel and Masterson (2004) the first three years of life are the most important for a child's development, which encludes the development of their speech. They are considered the foundation for achieving proper and correct verbal expressioning. Considering that the parents, the family in general, and then the educators and the child's peers are the persons with whom a child spends the most time, the second chapter points out the importance of surroundings and their role in encouraging and enabling progress in the development of a child's speech. Dramatisation games, reading picture books, storytelling, singing and role-playing of different occupations are only a few of numerous activities which require more speaking. They can be performed at home with the family, in early age educational institutions, but also in free time while spending time with children of the same age. Next, in chapter three different language games are listed. They play a significant role in the development of speech and in the enrichment of the child's vocabulary span. Games which encourage development of verbal expressioning and decrease certain speach difficulties are given as an example. Speech development can often result in problems, so the last, but not the least, chapter deals with speech difficulties that more and more children of an early pre-school age deal with, which includes language difficulties and speech disorders.