Classification Infant/Classroom

*Intellectual development: he can now understand 3 part instructions, and organise objects by type, size, colour, or shape.

The physical development of a baby in its first six months of life shows limited range of movement but the beginnings of an ability to respond to stimulus around them. They show their reaction to people, sounds and movement by turning their head toward whatever attracts their attention. They will watch an adult’s face whilst feeding, but have already begun to shows signs of recognition as they will smile when familiar people are around them either because they can see them

At the age of 4-7 the child reaches the, ?Intuitive?, stage, at this stage the child has some concept of differences i.e. the child can distinguish between the size and colour of different coloured bricks. However the child is still what Piaget called, ?Egocentric?, unable to see things from another?s point of view.

At the age of a year to 17 month children start to get interested in looking through books for a small amount of time. They begin to follow simple directions and answer simple questions with gestures. Children this age recognise familiar objects ,people

Laura Schulz’s presentation, The Surprisingly Logical Minds of Babies, explores the idea of how babies and young children are able to learn so much in such a short span of time. In Schulz’s presentation, the viewers see multiple video experiments where she introduces babies to different balls and toys that make noises. I choose to explain and break down the first experiment, that she discusses. In the first experiment Schulz has a colleague reach into a bucket with mostly blue balls and a few yellow balls. The colleague pulls out three of the balls and when she takes each ball out she squeaks them. The colleague then pulls out a yellow ball and hands it to the baby. The child copies what Schulz’s colleague has done, but however the

seen and provide a way that afterwards the child can then understand and be able to communicate what they have seen effectively. These skills are all very crucial in helping children and young people to learn and manage how to listen and understand different concepts. They can then have a chance to develop their own opinions and ideas to then be able to participate in different decision making and problem solving in appropriate ways. Babies are nonverbal so to begin with they use sounds and facial expressions to communicate to adults expressing themselves and their needs (e.g. smiling, cooing and gurgling). Toddlers then start to have a small understanding and can use words and gestures to make connections to people and be able to develop their knowledge and understanding

Imagine that you are a psychologist who wants to determine the earliest point in human development at which an infant can demonstrate specific skills, such as the ability to judge distances or to differentiate between lines at different angles. Suggest research approaches and techniques that might be helpful in studying these questions. Note the difficulties that might be expected.

* Sensorimotor (birth to approximately age 2) – begins to mentally represent objects and events

Children can classify and order, as well as organise objects into series. The child is still tied to the immediate experience but within these limitations can perform logical mental operations. For example, can solve mental problems using counters and objects.

In early learning environments, children acquire knowledge and develop cognitive, social and emotional, physical and language acquisition skills in the content areas such as language arts, math, science, and social studies in a variety of ways. It is up to the teachers to plan and implement in-depth studies of themes and topics that are meaningful and relevant to the children, being sure to address the development of the whole child while integrating all of the content areas. In the physical classroom the environment should provide students with hands-on opportunities to grow and develop skills, gain knowledge, and have fun as they explore carefully designed learning centers. They should be provided with materials that are related to

Cognitively, the way infants process information undergoes rapid changes during the infant’s first year. For instance, the Piagetian theory of cognitive development includes (1) the sensorimotor stage in which infants, through trial an error, build their understanding of things around the world (e.g. imitation of familiar behaviour); (p. 203, Chapter 6); (2) building schemas (e.g. a 5 month old child can move or drop an object fairly rigidly, whereas an older child can do the same action but with more intentional and creative movement);(p. 202, Chapter 6) and (3) the concept of object permanence (e.g. an infant knows that an object exists even though it is hidden encourages the child’s perceptual skills and awareness of the objects ‘realness’ in the world (p.

In the sensorimotor stage the child discovers the environment through physical actions such as sucking, grabbing, shaking and pushing. During these first two years of life children realize objects still exist, even if it is out of view. This concept is known as object permanence. Children in the preoperational stage develop language skills, but may only grasp an idea with repeated exposure. As Piaget describes in the next stage, children draw on knowledge that is based on real life situations to provide more logical explanations and predictions. Lastly, in the formal operational stage children use higher levels of thinking and present abstract ideas.

In the first, or sensorimotor, stage (birth to two years), knowledge is gained primarily through sensory impressions and motor activity. Through these two modes of learning, experienced both separately and in combination, infants gradually learn to control their own bodies and objects in the external world. Toward the end of Piaget¡¦s career, he brought about the idea that action is actually the primary source of knowledge and that perception and language are more secondary roles. He claimed that action is not random, but has organization, as well as logic. Infants from birth to four months however, are incapable of thought and are unable to differentiate themselves from others or from the environment. To infants, objects only exist when they are insight

Children develop cognition through two main stages that Jean Piaget theorized. The stages run from birth and infancy to school age children. Sensorimotor is the first stage and goes from birth to about the age of two. This stage implies that the children learn about the environment they live in and they learn this through the reflexes and movements they produce. They also learn that they are separate people from their parents and they can say goodbye to them and know they will come back. The second stage is called the preoperational stage. During this stage of development, children will learn how to incorporate symbols to represent objects. This is also the beginning of learning the alphabet and speech. The child is still very much egocentric at this point in time, but with the help of understanding educators, the child will grow appropriately onto the next stages of development. Finally, the children need to develop emotionally/socially.

This stage lasts from birth to twelve months. In this stage, infants gain knowledge about their surrounding by using their senses. (Clarke-Stewart, Gruber, & Fitzgerald, 2007, p. 154). They recognize the faces of their caregivers and may respond to smiles. At these stage infants are generally attracted to bright colors, and show response to sound by turning towards the direction of the sound. Studies have indicated that infants between the ages of three and seven weeks have the ability to recognize shapes and pictures of human faces (Goswami, 1994, p. 376).