Brain Development from One to Three

1. Brain Development from One to Three Standard(s): 3.2, 7.4

2. The Role of Intelligence • Intelligence: the ability to interpret and understand everyday situations and to use prior experiences when faced with new situations or problem • Also the capacity to learn • Shaped by heredity and environment • An environment that promotes learning is crucial

3. Methods of Learning • Children learn through everyday experiences and play • Incidental Learning: unplanned learning • Ex. Evan pushes a button on a musical toy and discovers it plays music

4. Methods of Learning, cont’d • Trail-and-Error Learning: when a child tries several solutions before finding one that works • Ex. Krista wants to play with her brother’s robot so she grabs it, he screams, and her mom makes her give it back. Krista realizes that if she offers her stuffed horse to her brother he may give her his toy to play with.

5. Methods of Learning, cont’d • Imitation: learning by watching and copying others • Ex. A younger sibling “copies” everything an older sibling does • Directed Learning: learning from being taught • Joel’s kindergarten teacher helps him learn the letters of the alphabet by showing pictures of items that begin with each letter

6. Concepts • Concepts: general categories of objects and information • Young children often over-apply labels • Ex. Toddlers may think that any round food is a cookie • Learn to categorize objects by shape, color, and size

7. Intellectual Activity • Intellectual activity is broken down into seven areas • Development in these areas is remarkable from one to three • Attention: the ability to focus for a time on just selected sensory information or an activity • Memory: the ability to store and recall information learned and events experienced in the past

8. Areas of Intellectual Activity • Perception: the ability to take in information from the senses • Reasoning: the ability to figure things out- what to do, the solution to a problem, why something has happened • Imagination: the ability to think of things in ways different from how reality exists

9. Areas of Intellectual Activity, cont’d • Creativity: the ability to make something concrete from what one has imagined • Curiosity: the inner need to question things that lead to learning more about them

10. Apply Your Learning . . . • With the people at your table, think of at least one activity/ lesson for each intellectual area listed below that you could conduct with toddlers. Your activity should help promote children’s intellectual development. • Attention • Memory • Perception • Reasoning • Imagination • Creativity • Curiosity