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This overview may support information you have been presented in other courses. If so…feel free to give it a cursory look. The narration in this presentation is very limited, since the slides speak for themselves. It is good preparation for the second presentation of this session on the impairments of language that impact school performance and later learning and adult functions.

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Awareness of the environment is the first indicator that a child is prepared to take in new information and realize what is around them in sight, sound, and other sensory pathways.

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Noticing familiar things that are stable to the day to day immediate environment allows memory to start forming.

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The first half of the first year allows the child to build on initial observation and apply that skill with its accompanying reinforcements from others to the “world” at large…that is the distinction of ME, from others and the objects that I see and use.

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By this time, the child is aware of himself of herself in space – noticing that objects move in and out of reach. The curiosity of the child for wondering where objects move to also develops at this time. The Yale Child Study Center has done extensive research on this period of development, with studies on how children act on their notice of objects that disappear from view.

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As the first birthday approaches, children have a greater awareness of their environment, how it changes and moves, and where they are within that environment.

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At around this age, children start to experiment with a wider sensory diet – manipulating objects, moving objects to where they want them, noticing that objects can be represented abstractly in pictures, and the important start of imitating sounds with speech. This period is also corresponding to greater mobility and children are moving on their own to touch, smell, eat, and listen to things that were primarily just visual stimuli before.

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These more social experiences provide more to “talk” about for the developing child. Greater awareness of subtle aspects of objects in the environment, such as things that move or have greater or lesser volume, further refine the process of assigning words to that environment.

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As children move into the period when a larger social group is introduced, via things like preschool or play groups, further refinement of motor, speech and quasi-school activities is apparent. The act of pretending to engage in reading and writing is developmentally right on target here. Children imitate the communication skills of those around them. Seeing adults reading and talking about what they are reading, and writing things like checks or notes, provides a model for young children to imitate.

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Children start to comply with directions that call upon them to show self-regulation at this point. Answering questions about what they are looking at, pointing or marking things that are depicted in print or text are tasks that will be used in future school related demands.

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Greater coordination of fine motor abilities emerges as children are in preschool and kindergarten. Manipulating objects like chalk, crayons, chubby markers and pencils, and adaptive scissors contributes to later tasks that require fine motor control to write fluently and accurately.

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Additional coordination of skill is developed in this period – dressing skills like buttoning and unbuttoning, lacing, putting puzzle pieces of increasing smaller sizes, and describing what the child is doing and why. Language is refined and developed quickly at this time, uniting spoken language with the representation of that language in symbols, such as letters, numbers, common logographic representations in the environment, and recognizing names in print. The next presentation will discuss this development and the things that complicate or delay this development.

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