Education equips kids with the right skills to get along with people from diverse backgrounds. This way, kids will be able to make a difference in their own communities and the world at large.
Everyday activities like babbling, responding to their name, and playing peekaboo are learning opportunities! Reading together and making up stories helps them learn about words, pictures, and letters.
Social and Emotional Development
Social and emotional development might not be as tangible as motor skills, but it’s just as important for children’s growth. It enables them to interact and develop relationships with peers, understand their emotions, take turns, be independent in following routines and other daily activities, and participate more in learning experiences.
Infants start developing social and emotional skills from birth. These are called early social-emotional milestones and include undiscriminating social responsiveness (0-3 months), attachment, play, theory of mind (or understanding others’ perspectives), self-awareness, and emotion regulation.
Children who are socially and emotionally healthy tend to be happier, have more interest in learning, follow directions better, and perform well academically than their less healthy peers. This is because their ability to regulate their attention and emotions allows them to be more focused on classroom activities.
Physical Development
Physical development involves changes in children’s bodies and their ability to use them. It includes growth in children’s muscles and the improvement of motor skills, which support other domains like social and cognitive development.
Children develop physically through regular movement and play. They also grow and change in response to a variety of factors, including age, health, nutrition, environment and genetics.
Children who are educated are more likely to stay healthy and be active. They are also more likely to have good jobs and contribute to society. However, many obstacles prevent children from accessing quality education, such as conflict, natural disasters, health problems and poverty. The UNICEF Let Us Learn program works to remove these barriers through advocacy, knowledge generation and sharing, capacity-building, and partnerships.
Language and Literacy Development
Children’s language and literacy development helps them understand the world around them, and think more deeply about what they learn. Reading and writing are important for self-expression and creativity, and help them develop cognitive skills, such as being able to reflect on their experiences and handle frustration.
Language and literacy develop through everyday interactions children have with others, such as listening to stories read aloud, interacting with their peers, and exploring books and other written materials like magazines and take-out menus. It is important to note that formal instruction to push young children to achieve adult levels of literacy before they are developmentally ready may actually have negative consequences and can lead them to associate the activities with failure and frustration1.
Literacy skills include decoding, or sounding out words; fluency, or being able to recognize a large number of words by sight; and reading comprehension. The latter involves a child understanding how words relate to one another within a sentence and the overall theme of the text, which can be enhanced by a student’s world experience, reasoning skills, and background knowledge.
Thinking (Cognitive) Skills
For children to access the curriculum, they must be able to think. This is the foundation upon which all other skills are built. Think of it like a house; the bricks, walls and frame all work together to support the roof. Without a strong foundation, the roof can’t work as well.
As infants and toddlers move through the sensorimotor stage, they learn about the world around them by touching and exploring objects. They develop their attention and can stay focused on one activity for a period of time, but often want to jump to something new before they have had the chance to store it in their short-term memory.
From about age 2 to 6 or 7, young children start thinking abstractly and logically. While debate continues about whether early number sensitivity is solely perceptual or also numerical, most developmental theorists agree that this development is a fundamental change in how children think.