EYFS Developmental Milestones, Slides of Psychology

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Developmental Milestones t overers QV wesco Pre-natal Introduction List of Figures References The World of the Newborn: An accelerated learning machine........................................ 4 Discovering the Rational Infant......................................... 8 ...................................................................................... 3 ..................................................................................... 35 ..................................................................................... 36 Talking Toddlers: The doors of perception..................................................... 13 The Virtual Two: A work in progress............................................................ 16 Entry-level Word Processor: The toddler as an apprentice ‘wordamatician’....................... 21 ‘Curiouser and Curiouser’ The child’s EYFS journey gathers pace.................................. 26 Magnets and Miracles: The EYFS twilight zone........................................................ 30 Contents: 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months 0 - 11 Months Page 5 Learning in the womb Scientists point out that, in behavioural terms, a 32-week-old foetus is very much the same as a newborn. Neurologically speaking, birth is not a major milestone, but as the following diagram reveals, much else has happened to the developing foetus at an earlier stage: According to Hopson (1998), by nine weeks, a foetus can react to a loud noise, and before six months, it has excellent hearing. This enables it to recognise its mother’s voice – reacting differently to the voices of strangers – and respond in the same way each time it hears a familiar story. Just like adult dreamers, a foetus exhibits rapid eye movement (REM) during sleep, and cultural life begins in the womb as the foetus savours the food tastes in its mother’s diet and listens to the music it hears from the outside world, often responding to certain familiar pieces. For the foetus, the womb appears to be as much a workstation as a resting place: Hopson quotes developmental psychologist Als Heidelise from Harvard Medical School who reports that the foetus ‘touches a hand to the face, one hand to the other hand, clasps its feet, touches its foot to its leg, its hand to its umbilical cord’. Others have observed the foetus pushing off with its feet as if walking around the womb, and speculate that later-born children – whose mothers have a more-extended womb and a longer umbilical cord – enjoy extra room for this motor experience, and thus are likely to develop into more- active infants. According to DeCasper and Fifer (1980) among others, much of the learning within the womb takes place via ‘habituation’ – the repetition of a stimulus which first provokes a reaction, later modified once the stimulus has become familiar. As regards hearing, a foetus not only prefers its mother’s voice, as a newborn it demonstrates a distinct preference for the sound of that voice filtered through the womb’s amniotic fluid, rather than through air, and enjoys that familiar voice much less if it then switches to a foreign language. Figure 2.1: Foetus behaviours and attributes within the womb (Inspired by Hopson (1998)) SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 6 Newborn perspectives Science no longer perceives the newborn infant as a passive receiver but an eager participator. Perhaps mothers instinctively sense this as they endlessly coo and talk to their baby, smile, sing, and gaze into her eyes. Dewar’s account (Dewar, 2009) reveals that researchers too are equally confident neonatal infants arrive pre-installed with social attributes helping them to: • recognise both voices and faces; • communicate with others; • build an understanding of the minds of other humans. Though a newborn has limited vision – sight, hampered by the womb’s visual limits, is the last primary sense to develop – the ability to recognise familiar faces emerges within hours of birth. So too does a preference to engage with those who use direct eye contact. Studies also demonstrate the neonatal child avidly follows the gaze of a parent, as if curious to know what has excited interest, and why. Even more remarkably, Meltzoff and Moore (1983) discovered that, at just one-hour old, newborns were able to mimic facial expressions they observed for just 20 seconds – a dramatic illustration of Colwyn Trevarthen’s extensive work over four decades suggesting babies are pre-programmed to ‘coordinate their actions with others’. Reviewing the vast field of contemporary newborn research, Streri et al (2013) strongly believe that ‘for human newborns, the studies concerning their cognitive abilities... are far from having established the full repertoire of competencies that they possess.’ A leading researcher herself, Alison Gopnik (1999) eloquently summarises how far science has taken us beyond the traditional newborn image of ‘innocence and helplessness’: Figure 2.2: Newborn attributes soon after birth (Inspired by Dewar (2009), Meltzoff & Moore (1983)) SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 7 “… what we see in the crib is the greatest mind that has ever existed, the most powerful learning machine in the universe. The tiny fingers and mouth are exploration devices that probe the alien world around them with more precision than any Mars rover. The crumpled ears take a buzz of incomprehensible noise and flawlessly turn it into meaningful language. The wide eyes that sometimes seem to peer into your very soul actually do just that, deciphering your deepest feelings. The downy head surrounds a brain that is forming millions of new connections every day. That, at least, is what thirty years of scientific research have told us.” Wide eyes that peer into your soul. SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 10 0 - 11 Months Newborn cognition Prior to the 1960s, newborn ‘blank slate’ research was hampered by the fact that very little more than motor behaviour was explored. A closer inspection of gaze activity then ushered in the concept of very young infants ‘able to perceive and understand … the environment before they are able to actively act on it.’ (Streri et al., 2013). This development greatly encouraged newborn research. Now, for example, it has been established that – nine minutes after birth – newborns can: • ‘perceive patterns of faces, • discriminate between curved/rectangular 2D shapes, • conceive the unity of partially hidden objects, and • discriminate between smaller numerosities (black dots in 2s or 3s).’ (Streri et al., 2013) Attention Similar early reservations had been expressed about infant attention spans – even EYFS development guidelines suggest attention is ‘not under a child’s control’ at this stage. However, given the benefit of modern research initiatives, Gopnik (1999) has an alternative view: … when we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they’re bad at not paying attention. So they’re bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell them something and just looking at the thing that’s important. That’s the kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn. In contrast to adults, who have well-developed, exclusively ‘spotlight’ attention strategies, Gopnik believes infants use expansive, ‘lantern’ attention strategies, as depicted below: Figure 3.2: Comparison of adult and infant attention strategies (Inspired by Gopnik (1999)) SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 11 0 - 11 Months Language Scientists such as Michael Meyerhoff (2006) now confidently assert that ‘babies’ intellects are working, and working very well, long before they can talk’, and bearing this out, US research into infant babble at eight months, completed in 2014, tells us: “… infants whose mothers responded to what they thought their babies were saying, showed an increase in developmentally advanced, consonant-vowel vocalisations, which means the babbling has become sophisticated enough to sound more like words ... The infants were using vocalisations in a communicative way ... because they learned they are communicative.” (Michiko et al., 2015) And a recent study of brain activity in 11-month-old infants, conducted by scientists from Warwick University (2015), found a biological predisposition to linking images and sounds, giving infants both the tools and insight to understand that spoken words relate to real-world visual objects – the gateway to speech. SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 12 The most patient teachers a child could wish for. Born to learn Meltzoff proposes that imitation is a favoured mode of infant learning, and both parents and childcare professionals would surely concur with his observation that ‘mutual imitation produces a powerful impression in both infant and caretaker that they have psychologically “made contact”, that they are in a relationship.’ And once this behaviour is established, he believes, ‘the infants’ ability to detect that something out there in the world is like them, and can do what they do, has cascading developmental effects.’ Emerging evidence suggests infants and newborns may have a relatively simple, ‘knowledge-lite’ mode of learning which optimally equips them for the noisy intricate world they have recently encountered. Researchers believe that a ‘multidimensional world’ demands ‘mechanisms that allow (infants) to immediately adapt to that environment.’ As a result, they argue, the ‘mind of the newborn might be better prepared to extract invariants from complex, multimodal situations.’ (Streri et al., 2013) Modern research thus provides us with ample evidence that each rational infant arrives with at least three custom keys to help unlock the mysteries of life: innate, evolutionary-coded knowledge; powerful, purposebuilt learning abilities; and a loving family comprising the most patient and dedicated teachers a child could ever wish for. Figure 3.3: The rational infant’s guide SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 15 The need for solid ground Finding behavioural methods to test babies’ reactions in order to assess their perception is a well-established research strategy. In an early example, Lee and Aronson’s study (1974), the first to identify the role of vision in monitoring posture, placed toddlers who had learned to stand on a solid floor inside a specially constructed room with three moveable walls. In ‘normal’ mode, the children were able to balance properly, but once the moving walls came closer, or moved further away, each child swayed and experienced a loss of balance. Figure 4.2: The operation of the sway reaction in toddlers In every case, the toddlers’ reaction was the same: leaning forward when the walls came forward, and backwards when the walls moved away. These results show that, when learning to walk, toddlers rely heavily on stable visual feedback from a ‘fixed’ visual landscape in order to control and balance the necessary motor functions, and that anything distorting this visual flow quickly precipitates a loss of balance. Follow-up studies also demonstrated that the visual abilities required for walking did not develop in parallel with motor capacity – non- walking crawlers displayed exactly the same sway-reaction when sitting in the experimental room. In addition, researchers discovered the balance loss to be most acute during the first three months, after which the effect began to subside. Though the prelude to walking and talking is undoubtedly demanding for toddlers, they continue to show an undaunted zest for expanding their universe, supported by an insatiable curiosity inspired by the unexpected; a superbly adaptable neural-plasticity mechanism custom-built for rapid learning cycles based on experiment/analyse/reset repeat; and powerful perceptive abilities which continue to surprise us at every turn. Finding his feet and voice will change his life forever. SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 16 The Virtual Two: A work in progress Having cracked the outer layers of the language code and largely mastered the basics of mobility, the former yearling is heading towards ‘supertot’ status – more prosaically defined in Early Years Foundation Stage terms as 16 to 26 months. Even though walking and talking could hardly be described as honed to perfection, the ‘virtual two’ has left much of infancy behind. Yet despite his recent acquisitions, the aspiring two-year-old is still likely to find learning the ropes in this new phase a tough assignment. Betwixt and between Piaget (1952) describes the cognitive development of a child of this age as leaving the sensori-motor stage and entering, or about to enter, the pre-operational world of symbols. Meanwhile, as regards linguistics, work on two of the four knowledge elements Shaffer (1993) identifies as essential for mastery of language – phonology (sounds) and semantics (meanings) – is well under way. For Vygotsky (1978), the child’s language would be moving towards his second ‘complex’ stage where language and thought begin to move in parallel, and where tasks are mainly accomplished with the support of adult ‘scaffolding’. And according to Erikson’s psychosocial theory (Erikson, 1959), virtual twos are experiencing stage two where the major conflicts centre on autonomy vs. shame, resulting in a wilful push for independence interspersed with moments of paralysing doubt. The more particular phenomenon of ‘separation anxiety’ (Kagan, Kearsley and Zelazo, 1978) when a significant trusted caregiver is not nearby has most likely peaked just as this EYFS phase begins, and is now set to decline. SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 17 Interactive language Armed with a growing repertoire of nouns to name more and more objects in their world, virtual twos finally break the bonds which shackle the rest of the animal kingdom by uttering their first two-word sentence. This basic pattern, known as ‘telegraphic’ speech, strips communication to its essentials and usually requires some contextual interpretation by those sensitive to, and familiar with, a child’s needs and routines. For example: ‘Mummy, chair’, could have a range of meanings such as ‘I want to sit in my chair’, ‘I want to sit in Mummy’s chair’, ‘Mummy is sitting in her chair’, ‘Mummy, sit in your chair’ etc. During this phase, the limitations of two-word telegraphic speech are ingeniously circumvented by the child’s use of what Braine (1963) identifies as a ‘pivot’ word followed by an ‘open’ word to give a useable variety of phrases: ‘all gone’, ‘all done’, ‘all clean’, ‘all messy’, and so on. This approach is illustrated in Figure 5.1 below: Figure 5.1: Two-word telegraphic speech strategies (Inspired by Braine (1963)) Further research confirms this mechanism to be universal: “All over the world, children apparently talk about the same meanings—or ideas—in their first sentences … (they) refer to possession (Mommy dish, my coat), action-object sequences (hit ball, drop fork), attribute of an object (big truck, wet pants) or an object’s location (cup shelf, teddy bed).” (De Villiers, 1979) SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 20 The views of those who are concerned about the adverse effects of media exposure are echoed in the closing statement from the Kaiser Family Foundation’s (2005) historical review of media research: “… research has not come close to keeping up with the pace of new media development. Infants, toddlers and preschoolers today are developing in an environment saturated with media, and unanswered questions abound concerning their use of electronic media. In order to fully grasp the positive and negative consequences of this media use, funding must be available for a comprehensive, cohesive research agenda on media effects.” Widely reported Boston University School of Medicine statements about recent research (Guardian newspaper, 2015) are equally cautious about the use of new mobile media devices by the very young. Researchers recommend interactive co-viewing and limited access, saying: “… there are more questions than answers when it comes to mobile media. Until more is known about its impact on child development, quality family time is encouraged, either through unplugged family time, or a designated family hour.” Acquiring basic skills in operating equipment SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 21 Entry-level Word Processor: The toddler as an apprentice ‘wordamatician’ Generally much smarter than he sounds, and therefore frequently under-estimated, the child described in the Early Years Foundation Stage 22 to 36 months phase has the keys to the discovery zone, but sometimes finds his recently acquired autonomy takes him to places his patience just doesn’t want to go. Yet even though he has still to learn to negotiate all kinds of barriers, this young adventurer risks everything just to move forward, knowing instinctively that such behaviour, supported by his evolving language skills, will reap incredible rewards. The cognitive development debate The majority of children at this developmental phase will be entering Piaget’s ‘pre-operational’ Stage 2 (Piaget, 1952), where the theory states a child will ‘learn to use language and to represent objects by images and words’. Importantly, the theory also holds that ‘thinking is still egocentric – (the child) has difficulty taking the viewpoint of others,’ and is inclined to ‘classify objects by a single feature’. Piaget’s work casts Stage-2 children as being unable to ‘decentre’ – and thus effectively unaware of any perspective beyond their own. However, many critics have demonstrated that Piaget’s experiments were flawed in a number of respects, some even observing that a more sympathetic reading of Piaget’s outcomes could suggest his child subjects, rather than displaying ignorance, were following researcher’s verbal cues. Fontana’s comment not only reinforces this view, but acts as a warning to caregivers: Figure 6.1: Contrasting assertions informing language development SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 22 “Children’s failure to understand the questions and instructions and explanations offered to them by adults is due less to their own shortcomings than to the frequent inability of adults to present these communications to them in a form which is appropriate to the level at which conceptually they are able to function.” (Fontana, 1981) Where Piaget stressed self-activation as the basis of cognitive development, Vygotsky by contrast saw the child as developing understanding and expertise in a social context via the role of an apprentice. A child’s language, Vygotsky argued, was central to this process; and where Piaget (1926) dismissed child self-talk as ‘egocentric speech’, Vygotsky (1962) instead saw ‘private speech’ – a key feature required for the promotion of cognitive development. Self-talk Most childcare professionals will, of course, be aware young children talk to themselves. This important phenomenon commonly emerges a little after 24 months, and peaks during the pre-school years. Many have argued its presence implies the existence of planning and monitoring capabilities, whilst Berk (1994) believes this is ‘an essential part of cognitive development for all children’. Researchers have found such utterances tend to mirror a child’s developmental experiences, noting private speech can occur, for example: • when the child makes comments and/or produces noises during fantasy- or pretend play; • as a spontaneous outburst with emotional overtones, such as the staccato ‘Oh … Oh’; • where the child employs it as a tool for self-guidance, frequently echoing a salient fragment of prior adult instruction. SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 25 At the heart of this technique is the notion that open questions prompt the child to take the lead whilst the adult supplies informative and expansive feedback customised to the child’s level of understanding, a strategy resulting in richly rewarding responses paving the way for lasting advances in literacy and language development. Whilst daily life has its fair share of frustrations for the two-year-old whose third birthday is approaching at a rapid pace, helping this child to understand, articulate and deploy language is one sure way to promote and encourage the mindset required to successfully navigate such challenges, whilst simultaneously honing a core communication tool which will last a lifetime. Shared-reading nurtures language abilities. SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 26 Whilst it would be an exaggeration to claim the child between 30 and 50 months has become an entirely independent social being, liveliness, resilience and an enormous degree of inquisitiveness are now the dominant traits of these increasingly talkative and assertive adventurers. Little wonder that parents and childcare professionals are starting to look towards progressively more challenging provision with elements perhaps leading to formal outcomes mimicking the curriculum formats children will subsequently encounter at ‘big school’. Early years identity Taking an active interest in their child’s education and welfare is, of course, a fundamental and enduring aspect of parental support which every educationalist wishes to encourage However, Lindon (2008) has professional reservations about some attitudes she believes contribute to a failure to treat children between 30 and 50 months ‘as young children learning within an early years curriculum’, noting: “… entry into reception class is frequently described as “starting school” - by parents and also practitioners. Some primary schools also treat their reception classes as effectively the first year of school and very young children are shoe- horned into the role of “pupil”.” Stressing that accommodating demands which ‘steamroller down from an older age band’ is far from good practice, Lindon nevertheless senses ‘an enthusiasm to be known as “pre-school”’, and cautions: “It is so much harder to promote the early years … as valid in their own right, when so many people involved in this professional field are content to be described as a kind of waiting room for school.” Such highlighting of the danger that some early-years educators may pay lip-service to schemes of work as they push on through EYFS leads naturally to a review of literature and research findings which support and inform the learning and development of children between 30 and 50 months – or have the potential to do so. ‘Curiouser and Curiouser’: The child’s EYFS journey gathers pace SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 27 The influence of major cognitive theories Figure 7.1: Significant cognitive theories All cognitive theories can be applied to education and have influenced curriculum development. Piaget’s work (Piaget, 1952) has shaped what, when, and how children are taught, and has prompted the evolution of childcentred ‘discovery learning’. By contrast, Vygotsky’s emphasis on the social context (Vygotsky, 1981) favours teacher-child interaction – especially as regards ‘scaffolding’ – and underpins classroom groupings of all kinds where both collaboration and conflict encourage fruitful learning outcomes. The American ‘information processing’ theory (2001) abandons Piagetian cognitive-development stages altogether, instead emphasising an ongoing pattern of development and presenting the mind as a mechanism with an attention phase for information input, a working memory for active manipulation, and a long-term memory for subsequent retrieval. According to this theory, which has heavily influenced reading and mathematics, processing advances as a child develops. Information processing can be a useful way of considering the teaching strategies a task demands – for example by avoiding many explicit instructions for an implicit learning task. Also forsaking Piaget’s neat phases, Bruner (1960) proposes three stages of his own: namely the enactive (0-1 years), iconic (1-6 years) and symbolic (7 years and above). At the iconic stage, Bruner believes learners primarily store information as images, so here illustrations strongly support verbal information. His ‘spiral curriculum’ theory proposes that even complex concepts can be introduced in an ‘intellectually honest’ form to young children, if appropriately tailored to their developmental understanding. These important core subject concepts are later revisited, appropriately recast at each later stage, to promote deeper understandings. SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 30 Magnets and miracles: The EYFS twilight zone “Beyond the horizon of the place we lived when we were young, In a world of magnets and miracles, Our thoughts strayed constantly and without boundary…” ‘High Hopes’ - Pink Floyd (1994) Young children between 40 and 60 months have entered the final EYFS phase which will inexorably lead them towards the dizzy heights of ‘big school’. This is indeed a time of high hopes and great expectations, and as the Pink Floyd song quoted above – which focuses on the effect of transitions – similarly acknowledges, ‘desire and ambition’ are natural and familiar life forces driving us on ‘beyond the horizon’. A new world As children, teachers and parents are swept forward on this tide of progress, what is not always quite so apparent, and thus often overlooked, is that the next phase of education actually has very different goals, and very different methods of achieving them. This new world will contain much more direct instruction, and as Donaldson (1978) points out, the normal school-ready child will enter school with ‘his thinking … directed outwards on to the real, meaningful, shifting, distracting world’, only to find the goalposts have been moved: “What is going to be required for success in our educational system is that he should learn to turn language and thought in upon themselves. He must become able to direct his own thought processes in a thoughtful manner.” Others too have noted that direct instruction, as Gopnik (2011) observes, ‘lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise’, which explains why such methods are extensively used to impart knowledge once formal education begins. Nevertheless, far from advocating a need to make ‘kindergartens and nurseries more like schools’, Gopnik is convinced that ‘very young children should be allowed to explore, inquire, play and discover’, and points out: “Perhaps direct instruction can help children learn specific facts and skills, but what about curiosity and creativity – abilities that are even more important for learning in the long run?” SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 31 Developmental differences Developmentally, our EYFS children between 40 and 60 months, mostly four-year-olds and ‘rising fives’, are very much part of a thrilling early-years world of ‘magnets and miracles’. Though children will inevitably graduate from this Elysian environment, educators and childcare professionals must be extremely wary of depriving them of its rich, once-in-a-lifetime benefits by replacing it with an inappropriate ‘school for babies’. Though all this could be read as a nostalgic appeal to put off formal learning for another day, Gopnik’s rationale clearly explains that a typical four-year-old is surprisingly good at discovering smart solutions to problems. Even so, his brain has not yet evolved to the extent that he copes well with the very different requirements of ‘routinised learning’ in school – defined as a process whereby ‘something already learned is made to be second nature, so as to perform a skill effortlessly and quickly.’ (Gopnik, 2005) Supporting this assertion, a recent study with this age group, by Bonawitz (2010), found that ‘direct instruction made the children less curious and less likely to discover new information’. Work by Buchsbaum et al (2011) similarly concluded that when a researcher assumed the role of a teacher ‘children imitated her exactly’, whereas if the adult researcher was just scaffolding play in the background, children discovered ‘more intelligent and more novel’ solutions. Those promoting early years learning should therefore beware of ‘advanced’ teaching and learning approaches which have more in common with Piaget’s third, ‘concrete operations’ stage (Piaget, 1952). Most of their charges will actually be securely grounded in the intuitive sub-stage of the ‘pre-operational’ second phase, and whilst a ‘go-forward’ curriculum may impress some schools and parents, it risks arresting holistic cognitive development at a time when children’s brains are ‘more connected, more flexible and more active than they ever will be again.’ This important feature of child development is too often overlooked by the ‘School- Ready’ movement, though many other educational. As always, the onus falls upon teachers and childcare professionals to determine the level of their children’s thinking and plan activities accordingly. Here, Fontana advises: “… children’s powers of conceptualization are linked closely to their physical activity … in an … exclusively teacher-orientated environment, children are therefore starved of the practical experience which serves as the raw material for their thinking.” (Fontana, 1981) SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 32 The focus of play Discussing the characteristics and importance of physical play, Sandström (1966) would expect to find ‘rulemaking’ a strong feature of children’s play at this EYFS phase, with ‘constructional play’ becoming common around the age of 4½. One important attribute which distinguishes constructional play from other forms of imaginative play is that it seems to be driven by results and outcomes, making it much more than amusement and entertainment. Rule- making, of course, implies ‘co-operative play’ which also appears at this stage of development, and Vygotsky’s theory (Vygotsky, 1981) also emphasises the value of social learning – which is why teachers find children learning in pairs are often motivated to complete tasks which would be daunting for an individual child. The development of increasingly social and interactive forms of play is illustrated in Figure 8.1 which combines the play descriptions independently devised by Parten (1932) and Sandström (1966). Task-monitoring provides essential feedback too because, as Fontana notes, ‘errors may … simply be evidence of children’s attempts to make sense of material in terms of their existing cognitive structures.’ Figure 8.1: Play types as a continuum (Inspired by Parten (1932) and Sandström (1966)) SECTIoN NAVIgATIoN Pre-natal 0 - 11 Months 8 - 20 Months 16 - 26 Months 22 - 36 Months 30 - 50 Months 40 - 60 Months Page 35 List of Figures Figure 1.1 Span and duration of pre-natal & EYFS developmental phases Figure 2.1 Foetus behaviours and attributes within the womb Figure 2.2 Newborn attributes soon after birth Figure 3.1 Timeline of principal child development theories Figure 3.2 Comparison of adult and infant attention strategies Figure 3.3 The rational infant’s guide Figure 4.1 The shared biological imperative to communicate Figure 4.2 The operation of the sway reaction in toddlers Figure 5.1 Two-word telegraphic speech strategies Figure 5.2 Extract from technology description in the EYFS document (2013) Figure 6.1 Contrasting assertions informing language development Figure 6.2 A child’s common verbal approximations Figure 6.3 Dialogic reading using a PAIR approach Figure 7.1 Significant cognitive theories Figure 7.2 Critical periods of brain development Figure 8.1 Play types as a continuum Figure 8.2 Maslow’s theory of motivation Page 36 References 365 website: (2012) ‘Playing with words’ http://www.playingwithwords365.com/2012/10/your-childs-speech- language-24-36-months/ American Academy of Pediatrics (2013) Policy Statement. PEDIATRICS Vol. 132 No. 5 November 1, 2013. Astington, J. and Edward, M. (2012) ‘The Development of Theory of Mind in Early Childhood’. Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development [online]. CEECD, SKC-ECD. January 2012. URL: http://www.child-encyclopedia. com/sites/default/files/dossiers-complets/en/social-cognition.pdf#page=16 Berk, L. (1994) ‘Why Children Talk to Themselves’ Scientific American: November Bonawitz, E., et al. (2010) ‘The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery’. Cognition. Braine, M. (1963) ‘The ontogeny of English phrase structure: The first phrase.’ Language, 39. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1989) ‘Ecological systems theory’. In: R. Vasta (Eds), Six theories of child development: Revised formulations and current issues. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Bruner, J. S. (1960) The Process of education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Buchsbaum, D., et al. 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