Kids that have access to education often see a more positive future. They’re more likely to have better earning potential, and a higher quality of life overall.
Social studies helps children learn about themselves and how they fit into their family, class, school and community. They also learn about other cultures’ languages and traditions.
Social and Emotional Development
A strong foundation of social and emotional development helps children learn, form trusting relationships and feel competent in their world. This aspect of children education begins at birth and continues to shape the rest of their lives.
Infants are born with the need and desire to connect with others. They are attuned to the reactions of those around them; they smile when adults laugh and frown when criticized.
They also quickly pick up on cues that help them determine whether a new experience is enjoyable or frustrating. If a teacher offers positive feedback, the child will likely persevere until they master a skill. Negative feedback can send the opposite message, so it is important that teachers are consistent with their communication and provide positive reinforcement.
A large body of research shows that a child’s social and emotional health influences their academic achievement, learning and overall well-being. It is essential that teachers promote positive emotions, healthy relationships and a sense of belonging in their classrooms.
Cognitive Development
While it was once believed that infants lacked the ability to think, cognitive development actually starts as early as birth. Babies are aware of their surroundings from the beginning, and actively learn by gathering, sorting, and processing data that helps develop perception and thinking skills.
As children grow older, they move into Piaget’s preoperational and concrete operational stages. They use language to communicate and think about what they have seen and experienced. They understand concepts like object permanence (that objects continue to exist even when they are not visible).
During this stage, they begin using logic in their reasoning and problem solving. They also start to understand how other people’s point of views might differ from their own. The egocentric thinking of this stage starts to diminish as they enter the formal logical operation stage of cognitive development. This is when they can apply logic to make hypothetical problems. Then they can solve them.
Language Development
A child develops spoken language by combining single words into two-word mini-sentences and then three-word phrases. At this point children can often pronounce all of the sounds in a word correctly, but may still have difficulty connecting sound to meaning. Children also tend to make errors such as substituting one sound for another that is close in pronunciation (for example, ‘p’ for ‘b’).
Children learn the meanings of new words by making associations with objects they have seen and experienced. They often overextend, or generalize, the meanings of a word from its context – for example, a cat that looks like other cats they have seen may be considered a cat and not a dog.
Infants unconsciously detect statistical properties of sound sequences that help them segment continuous sounds into word-like units, which are called morphemes. They also acquire grammatical rules, such as determiners (a, the), ‘ing’ inflection, plural’s’ and auxiliary verb be. However, they are likely to project these rules onto irregular verbs and make morphological errors such as the past tense ‘ed’ and the present tense ‘eat’.
Physical Development
Children’s physical development allows them to interact with and explore their world. Perceptual, gross motor, and fine motor skills support learning in all domains.
Caregivers help infants and toddlers develop physical skills by providing them with plenty of indoor and outdoor opportunities for movement and motor skill exploration, including toys that encourage reaching and grasping. Caregivers also use positive reinforcement and modeling to show children what their bodies can do. They may help them to move in a way that is safe, like holding their hands while they stand up, or encourage them to kick a ball to a friend.
When staff have concerns about a child’s physical or motor development, they should document their observations and discuss them with you or a trainer before sharing their concerns with the family. You can help staff understand the range of typical development by sharing developmental milestone resources with them, and highlighting that children reach these milestones at their own pace.