Key Terms and Concepts / APA
Physical Development
1. According to Berk (1999), “gross-motor refers to control over actions that help infants get around in the environment, such as crawling, standing, and walking” (p.183).
Children around the age of one start to show signs of gross-motor skills, such as walking, crawling and standing, and pulling themselves up-giving them lots of opportunities to practice these skills will help them master them.
2. According to Berk (1999), “fine-motor has to do with smaller movements, such as reaching and grasping” (p. 183).
It’s important to practice fine motor skills with children in order for them to master these skills. To name a few of the ways of practicing are handing the child a toy to grasp, a rattle to shake, holding their own bottle, grasping someone’s fingers or hand.
3. Handedness is genetically influenced and refers to the preferred hand a person chooses to do certain activities with, such as writing. It is also very plastic, meaning people can use the other hand in certain situations when the preferred hand isn’t available (Newman, 2015).
The little boy writes with his right hand, but when he broke his right arm, he switched his writing hand to the left hand, and his handedness changed and adapted to the situation.
Cognitive Development
1. According to Berk (1999), “classification is the organization of objects into classes and subclasses on the basis of similarities and differences” (p. 322).
The little girl showed the ability of classification when her mom asked her to separate the orange vegetables from the green vegetables and put them into small groups.
2. According to Berk (1999), “the ability to order items along a quantitative dimension, such as length or weight, is called seriation” (p.438).
The teacher was very pleased with her students’ seriation of toys when she asked them to clean up, because everything was put back in its proper place on the shelves in the classroom.
3. Piaget used conservation tasks in order to show the differences between operational and preoperational thinking, which are “tasks used to asses children’s use of operations, in which children must decide whether a transformed object is the same as or different from what it was before” (Martin, 2009, p.271).
The teacher used a conservation task with the children, pouring the same amount of liquid from a short wide glass to a tall skinny glass. Afterwards the teacher asked them which glass had more liquid in order to gain more insight into the children’s ability to recognize transformation.
4. Young children and their thinking shows centration “the tendency to focus attention on the most obvious and striking characteristic of an object while ignoring others” (Martin, 2009, p. 271).
The little girl started complaining that she didn’t get enough chips in her bowl because it wasn’t filled to the top. Her centration was on the size of the large bowl not the amount of chips in it.
5. From the ages of 2-7 years of age children move into the preoperational stage of cognitive thinking. This stage includes the use of symbolic representations, “Mental representations of objects and people that can be manipulated in the mind” (Martin, 2009, p. 270).
The 6-year-old boy displayed symbolic representation the day after his field trip to the local firehouse when he ran around the yard pretending to be a firefighter- putting out fires with an imaginary hose and saving imaginary people.
6. In terms of teaching children to read, one approach is emergent literacy which is, “an educational approach based on the idea that children will naturally develop the skills involved in written and oral language and gradually improve these skills as they grow” (Martin, 2009, p. 383).
In first and second grade Joe wasn’t as good at reading as other kids in his class. His mom took an emergent literacy approach, so his skills in reading and writing gradually developed as he got older, and eventually by the end of third grade he was reading at the same level as other kids his age.
7. When it comes to understanding language and the production of sounds, it is called expressive language when a child develops the ability to produce language. (Martin, 2009)
The toddler displayed expressive language when she and her mom where at the park looking at geese, she uttered the word, “bird” and pointed toward the direction of the geese.
Social/Emotional Development
1. According to Martin (2009), “self-concept is referring to an individual’s beliefs about the attributes and capacities she or he possesses” (p.300).
The young boy was expressing his idea of self-concept when he said “I’m hungry”.
2. According to Newman (2015), “empathy has been defined as sharing the perceived emotion of another” (p.253).
The little girl displayed empathy for the little boy who was crying after he fell. She came over to him with a concerned look on her face and asked if he was ok.
3. According to Hockenbury (2011), “egocentrism in Piaget’s theory, is the inability to take another person’s perspective or point of view” (p. 389).
The egocentrism was very apparent in the little boy when he got his grandma a toy car for her birthday because he wanted it.
4. According to Freberg (2010), “gender identity is our sense of being male or female, independent of genetic sex or physical appearance” (p. 290).
Toy stores should avoid putting toys in designated “girls” and “boys” sections in order for young children to naturally form their own gender identity.
5. According to Berk (1999), “pretend play is an excellent example of the development of representation in early childhood. Piaget believed that through pretending, young children practice and strengthen newly acquired representational schemes” (p.318).
The toy kitchen in the playroom was a great area for the children to pretend play and act out the roles of a typical household, where different children played the mother, father, and children.
Additional CD Terms
1. According to Hockenbury (2011), “in Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development, zone of proximal development is the difference between what children can accomplish on their own and what they can accomplish with the help of others who are more competent” (p. 393).
The little girl was in the zone of proximal development for successfully learning to swing herself by watching the other children kick their legs on the swing.
2. According to Crain (2015), “The child’s growth or development, Gesell said, is influenced by two major forces. First, the child is a product of his or her environment. But more fundamentally, the child’s development is directed from within by the action of the genes. This process is called Arnold Gesell’s Maturation” (p. 23).
Arnold Gesell’s Maturation theory has influenced and changed the way we raise our children, everywhere from in our homes to the schools they attend. Teaching can be adapted so that each child can go through every stage of maturation at their own pace.
3. According to NAEYC (n.d.), “developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) is a framework of principles and guidelines for best practice in the care and education of young children, birth through age 8. It is grounded both in the research on how young children develop and learn and in what is known about educational effectiveness.”
Teachers who use developmentally appropriate practices set up programs to meet the child where they are in development, to help and assist the child in overcoming challenges and set up healthy and achievable goals.
4. According to Newman (2015), “inclusion is in a school environment, the process of promoting contact between students with and without disabilities and creating an accepting social climate among students” (p. 277).
Inclusion of students with disabilities with non-disabled students in a classroom is important for all children because it is a safe environment for them to learn alongside each other as well as learn how to get along with other types of people.
5. The Medical Dictionary for the Health Professions (n.d.) states, “developmental milestones are the stages in the neuromuscular, mental, or social maturation of an infant or young child, generally marked by the attainment of a capacity or skill, such as rolling over, sitting with good head control, smiling spontaneously, laughing, and following moving objects with the eyes”.
Parents are the first adults that pay attention to the developmental milestones of their children. Often they write about these in baby books that document their first smile, first rollover, first steps in their lives.