Children learn by observing, gaining experience and adapting knowledge. Learning experiences must match a child’s emerging competencies and be challenging but not frustrating.
A quality education empowers children to improve their own lives and those around them. It equips them with the fundamental and specialized knowledge that they need to enter the workforce, contribute to economic growth and drive innovation and progress.
1. Social and Emotional Development
Developing children’s social-emotional skills is essential for their overall well-being and future success. Children with strong social-emotional skills are better able to manage their emotions and behaviors, have more positive relationships, and thrive in new situations.
Toddler social-emotional development includes learning to express their feelings in healthy, age-appropriate ways. They also learn to share and play cooperatively with peers.
They develop a sense of self and others and are able to distinguish between real and imaginary objects and events. By 4 years of age, children can play in cooperative, imaginative ways with 1 or 2 peers and engage in role-playing. They can also handle aggression and understand responsibilities. They learn to respect different cultures, histories, and perspectives. They also become more resilient and able to cope with stress and failure.
2. Physical Development
As children grow, they experience changes and advancements in their body’s physical health. This includes their gross motor skills (large movements such as walking, jumping and climbing) and fine motor skills (precise movements like gripping, grabbing and throwing objects).
Infants and toddlers develop their physical and motor development based on their interactions with the world around them. For example, when seven-month-olds use their motor skills to push a button on a toy, they learn that pressing the button results in an exciting sound.
Children who regularly engage in physical activities, such as playground visits and sports, have better muscle strength and coordination, and a healthy level of body fitness. This is essential for their physical and motor development. This is why the Pedagogical Framework recommends approaches and practices that promote physical development.
3. Language Development
Language development is a vital part of children’s growth and learning. It lays the foundation for literacy and relationships, and enables them to think clearly and express their emotions.
Children first learn to decode spoken language, and then to verbally communicate. Their vocabularies and grammar skills continue to grow throughout childhood as they explore new concepts through hands-on experiences, songs and rhymes, and reading books with them.
From about 18 to 24 months, toddlers go through a vocabulary spurt and acquire words that are related by sound (e.g., big-small, tall-short). This also allows them to start incorporating grammatical rules, such as determiners (a, the) and -ing inflection, into their speech, as well as the use of single dimension adjectives such as high-low and long-short.
4. Academic Development
Academic development aims to transform teaching and learning in positive ways. However, its influence is difficult to measure in ways that are meaningful and manageable.
Educators foster learning by challenging children with goals that are just beyond their current mastery and supporting them as they strive to reach these goals. This requires rich connections between subject areas, while allowing each to retain its core conceptual, procedural and epistemological structures.
Moreover, the knowledge we have about academic development is dominated by its practitioners, and can be self-justificatory and defensive. McNaught notes that this predominantly practical focus may stem from institutional factors such as appointment criteria, for example. It also could reflect a culture that favours research over practice. The solution is to develop creative methods of evaluating academic development.
5. Communication Skills
Children need to develop communication skills to be able to get their needs met and interact with others in a variety of settings. These include school, work, and social gatherings. Effective communication skills help children feel comfortable in these environments, as well as in their own homes and families.
Teaching kids to use appropriate body language when talking to people helps them communicate more effectively. Also, it is important to teach them to listen attentively to others and not interrupt conversations.
Parents should teach their children to respect and recognize other people’s feelings, as well as help them build on their language skills by helping them create a “feelings” vocabulary. This is especially important for pre-teens, who are prone to angry outbursts when they don’t feel understood by their peers.