Week 2 - Physical Development and Eric Carle

Reflexes

the infant’s first coordinated movements

Voluntary movements

the motor milestones

Newborn reflexes - primitive behavior (1 mo)

Eye blink, root, suck, swim, moro, palmar grasp (fingers automatically curl on object in palm), tonic neck (‘en garde’ position), stepping, babinski

primary

simple motor habits centered around the infant’s own body - limited anticipation

Good toys

crib mobile, rattles or other noise making toys, songs and lullabies

Birth - 6mo progress

• Pathways in the brain connect perception to action

• Motorically babies have a drive to repeat actions to learn about the physical world and construct an understanding of “reality”

• direction of growth - cephalocaudal and proximodistal

• Mouth, tongue, lips have twice as many sensory connections and are first to develop

4-8 mo

• Actions aimed at repeating interesting effects in the world

• Imitations of familiar behaviors - begin to adapt behaviors

• Easily recognize voice and face of parent

• Trapped in the here and now

• Good toys: squeeze toys, nesting cups, clutch balls, floating bath toys, picture books

8-12 mo

• Intention or goal directed behavior

• Search and find for hidden object

• Improved anticipation of events

• Imitation of behaviors slightly different from those usually performed

• Drive to be independent

• Toward latter end of this age - begin to walk!

Gross Motor Skills

crawling (7mo), standing (11mo), and walking (11-12 mo)

• Movements start off as gross, diffuse activity, and move toward mastery of fine movements

Motor Development in Infancy + Toddlerhood

• Allow babies to master their bodies and the environment in new ways

• Gives infants new perspective on the world

• Reaching allows babies to find out about objects by acting on them

• Impact on social relationships

18-24 mo: gross motor

• Body becomes more streamlined and less top heavy

• Center of gravity shifts downward, toward trunk

• Balance improves

• Takes 18-24 months for the gait (manner of walking) to be smooth and rhythmic

Motor development in early childhood

• Center of gravity shifts downward and balance improved greatly

• Arms and torsos are freed to experiment (throwing, catching balls, steering tricycles)

Fine Motor: reach and grasp

• 3-4 mo reaching appears purposeful

• 5-6 months can reach for object in dim room, suggesting that baby doesn’t need vision to guide the arms and hands in reaching

  • Movement is governed by proprioception: our sense of movement and location in space

• Reaching improves as depth perception advances and as infants gain greater control of body posture and arm and hand movements

• Once infants can reach they modify their grasp (by 8-11)

Depth perception

the ability to judge the distance of objects from one another and from ourselves

• Visual cliff

• Motion: clue to proximity

• Binocular depth cues: blending of images from each eye

• Pictorial depth cues: clues that objects are not flat

Pencil grasp

Between ages 3-5 children acquire pencil gripping skill

Letter formation

• Distinguish writing from non writing by age 4

• Confusion of letter patterns are common up until age 8

Fine Motor Development

By age 6 most children can print the alphabet, their first and last names, and 1-10. Writing is large, using strokes involving entire arm

Motor System’s Assembly

Motor skills are not hardwired into NS, but softly assembled by exploration and experience

• Each new motor skill is the joint product of:

  • CNS development

  • The body’s movement capacities

  • The goals child has in mind

  • Environmental support for the skill

• Skills are mastered through repetition and exposure (ex: set of stairs at home)

  • In learning to walk, toddlers practice 6 or more hours a day

Physical Growth and Sleep Patterns

• Physical growth

  • At birth, avg newborn weighs 7½ lbs

  • Infants double their weight by 5 months

• Sleep patterns

  • During first month, newborns spend ⅔ of their time sleeping, waking every 3 hrs

  • REM sleep accounts for 50% of newborn sleep time

  • Variations in parent approaches to sleep

    • Sleep training → co-sleeping

Growth Spurts

intervals of growth and stability

• 1 month intervals until 5mo, then spurts at 8, 12, and 20 mo

by 6, avg North American child weight 45lbs and is 3½ ft tall

Over next few yrs, children will add 2-3 in. and 5 lbs each year

physical growth in infancy and toddlerhood

heredity, nutrition, emotional well-being

• 25% of infant’s total caloric intake is devoted to growth

Physical development - early childhood

pituary gland releases:

• growth hormone (GH): necessary for development of almost all body tissue

• thyroid-stimulation hormone (TSH): prompts release of thyroxine which is necessary for brain development and for GH to have its full impact on body size

emotional well-being

• stress suppresses the release of GH

• extreme deprivation = psychosocial dwarfism

Factors related to physical development in early childhood

Sleep Habits

• Gh is released during sleeping hours

• 2 and 3 year olds sleep 11-12 hrs on average

• American children stop napping between 3-4 yrs

• Sleepwalking and nightmares are common, night terrors in 3% of children

Nutrition

Infectious Disease

Value of shared book reading with young children

• home literacy environment

• socio-economic factors

• shared book reading interventions

Home literacy environment

shared book reading

• Amount of time spent listening to stories at 1-3 associated with teacher ratings of language skills at 5 yrs old and reading comprehension at 7 yrs old

• Significant relationship between the frequency of parent-preschooler reading and children’s reading, spelling, and IQ scores at 13

• Significant relationship between the reported age of onset of shared reading and children’s language scores at 4

Socio-economic factors

• Typical middle-class child enters school with 1000-1700 hours of shared book reading vs 25 hours for the average low-income child

• 47% of public-aid parents report no alphabet books in the home vs 3% of professional parents

• Children from low-income homes start 1st grade behind their peers in language ability, phonological sensitivity, and print knowledge

Dialogic reading

child becomes storyteller while adult is active listener and coach

• 3 core techniques

1. “What” questions

2. Open-ended questions

3. Expanding upon what the child says

• Children whose teachers and parents were trained in dialogic reading gained significantly in emergent writing, print knowledge, and language

What was the audience like for Carle?

When book was first published, libraries didn’t see it as part of their job to serve children and their parents

During 1970s, day care centers and preschool were becoming common

• These developments created the first audience for Eric Carle’s work