24 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
How to Provide Language Enrichment to Children
First of all, language stimulation should begin very early: by just three years of age, children are already headed down vastly different paths of verbal achievement as a result of their cumulative experience with language. Ideally, language stimulation should begin at birth, since we know that newborns' brains are already attuned to human speech and immediately start learning the sounds of their mother tongue. In fact. Fowler's group found that babies who entered their program between six a...
1 Begin stimulating the child early, provide as much quantity of language stimulation as possible, and pay attention to the quality of language, making it age-appropriate and clearly enunciated.
24 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
The Word Explosion in Infants
Babies first bridge the gap between sounds and meaning as early as nine or ten months of age. They learn the names of family members and pets, the meaning of no! and perhaps a few general labels like shoe and cookie. By his first birthday, the average child understands around seventy words, mostly nouns like people's names and terms for objects, but also certain social expressions, like hi and bye-bye. Of course, he cannot say nearly that many. The median number of words spoken by a one-year-... 1 
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notesWhen children learn about four-dozen words, they suddenly begin to learn many more at an accelerated pace.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Babies are Scientists
Babies start out believing that there are profound similarities between their own mind and the minds of others. That belief gives them a jump start in solving the Other Minds problem. But during the first three years they also observe the differences in what people do and say. Those differences stem from the fact that all minds aren't actually entirely alike. Babies and young children watch and listen with careful focused interest as their mother refuses to let them touch the lamp cord or as ... 1 notes
notesTheir drive to play is a drive to explore, they are equipped with the cognitive and physical tools to explore their world and feed their curiosity about it.
08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
When Babies Learn Categorization
However, there is some surprising evidence that young babies are actually not particularly interested if a blue toy car goes in one edge of the screen and a yellow toy duck emerges at the far edge on the same trajectory! A grown-up would assume the duck that came out was brand-new and the other toy was still there behind the screen. But young babies seem content to think the toy somehow magically became a new kind of thing behind the screen. The particular kind of category-crossing magic tric... 1 notes
notesBy three years of age, children develop a fairly sophisticated sense of categorization. Perhaps a playing close attention to taxonomy will benefit the child at this stage in their development.
19 APR 2011 by ideonexus
It Wasn't the Apple that Newton Used to Discover Gravity
Science finds order and meaning in our experience, and sets about this in quite a different way. It sets about it as New¬ ton did in the story which he himself told in his old age, and of which the schoolbooks give only a caricature. In the year 1665, when Newton was twenty-two, the plague broke out in southern England, and the University of Camb] idge was closed. Newton therefore spent the next eighteen months at home, removed from traditional learning, at a time when he was impatient for kn...
1 Gravity was already known, Newton's vision was extending the force of gravity up to the Moon.
