Early Childhood Advancement Center

These are the developmental milestones we look for in our children.  

 I.  Physical & Motor

• 12-18 Months:
  • Coordinated actions with hands, develops ability to use spoon to feed self.
  • 11 mos. Neat pincher grasp of pellet
  • 12 mos. Inserts pellet in bottle
  • 11 mos. Voluntary release of cube
  • 12 mos. Superior forefinger grasp of cube.
  • Balance and stable walking develops
  • 12.3 mos. walks alone steadily
  • 16.6 mos. walks up steps alone (holding rail)
  • 18 mos. builds tower with cubes, turns pages, 1st attempts to jump off low steps.
• 18-24 Months:
  • Locomotion- stable, prefer to be independent walkers, resist handholding and start running.
  • More autonomous- feeding, dressing
  • Sleeping- through the night and afternoon nap
• 24-36 Months
  • 24-30 months
    • Small motor- uses large crayons and pencils, and sign language
    • Large motor- rides large wheeled toys, can throw a ball 4-5 feet, and can walk sideways and backwards
• 30-36 months
  • Small motor-building toys uses paints, clay, hammers
  • Large motor- walks up and down stairs alternating feet, in a line, heel to toe, hops, short
  • Distance on balance beam, throw a ball 10 feet, and finds a route in an unfamiliar place

• 12-18 Months:
  • Types of play
    • 7-13 months: Simple social/ Simple Object Play. They begin to parallel play with peers.
    • 13-18 months: Object play with mutual regard. Infants attend to objects and adults at the same time through games and conversations. 
  • Know the types of parent child play
  • Three different types of parent-child play
    • Interpersonal Play- face-to-face interactions, social games or routines.
    • Object Play- involves toys and play materials and is characterized by less mutual engagement than interpersonal play.
    • Symbolic Play- the use of pretend games and/or objects to represent something else.
• 18-24 Months
  • Piaget (Stage 6): the final stage of Sensor motor development: the invention of new means through mental combinations before any action.
  • Babies can find objects after any number of visible or invisible displacements
  • Symbolic Play- pretend play (a bowl becomes a boat)
  • Levels of symbolic play
    • Pre-symbolic acts- comb one's hair
    • Self-symbolic acts- pretend to sleep
    • Object-centered symbolic games- feeding a doll
    • Object-combination symbolic games- taking a doll and teddy for a walk
    • Planned symbolic games- saying, "lets cook dinner", before doing it.  
• 24-36 Months
  • If a traumatic event occurs before age2, participatory memories remain, but unconsciously, not verbally (verbal amnesia). After age 2, a child has verbal skills enough to be able to communicate the event.
  • At around 30 months, they begin, literally, to talk to themselves.
  • Piaget (3 types of pretend play)
    • Reconstruction of experiences
    • Imaginative pretend play- invents whole new situations in make-believe.
    • Liquidating pretend play- usually relive an unpleasant event as a way of coping and to assimilate what happened. 
  • Improved hand-eye coordination
    • Egocentric: thinking only from own perspective
    • Starts to think symbolically
    • Deferred imitation
    • Pretend play
    • Follows simple requests
    • Increasing focus
    • Classification on one-dimension

• 12-18 Months
  • Emergence of 1st words
  • Holophrastic speech: using a single word to express a complete thought
  • Can follow one-step directions
  • Naming explosion begins
  • Telegraphic speech: speech with all but the key words omitted 
  • Holophrase Speech- single words used to convey larger meanings.
  • Telegraphic speech- 2 word utterances, which consist of key words.
• 18-24 Months
  • Language development. Vocabulary and speech is speeding up
  • 18-24 months brings a rapid increase in vocabulary (5 or more words per week)
  • Referential speech- object names, nouns, single words and referential (such as reading in books)
  • Expressive speech- social routines, pronouns, phrases, and interpersonal (such as in free social play
• 24-36 Months
  • Autobiographical memory- the ability to remember experiences verbally
  • Private speech- the use of language to regulate ones' s own behavior without the intention of a social communication.

• 12-18 Months
  • Infant visibly fight back tears and use self- comforting techniques such as hugging themselves
  • Develops ability to cope with separation, distress, and stressful events
  • Affection/ love- infants can remain happy over a long period without the continuation of the event
  • Babies make funny faces, stick out their tongue, and show off
  • They show delight in their own achievements
  • Empathetic concern (combination)
  • Empathy- sharing the same emotion that another person is experiencing.
  • Sympathy- feelings of sorrow and compassion for another person who is in distress.
  • Begin to comprehend verbal labels used to describe emotional expressions
  • Embarrassment and other complex social emotions appear.
• 18-24 Months
  • After 18 months, babies smile during periods of affective sharing
  • In second year, infant laughter takes on a specific meaning within the mother-infant communication system
  • The ability to form mental images and create symbols increases the range of infant's emotional experiences. (Fear of monsters, the dark, & talk in sleep)
  • By 24 months, infants engage in conversations about their feelings, causes of feelings, and pretend games with certain kinds of feelings
  • Self conscious emotions develop - shame and pride (success or failure) requires an awareness of an existential self.
• 24- 36 Months
  • Gain ability to label and talk about emotions and the ability to understand the causes of emotional states in self and others
  • Laughter as an emotional communication- comment, chuckles, rhythmical and squeals are associated with a specific type of situation.
  • 3 year olds can also modify their speech when talking to a baby in the form of mother.
  • Increasing autonomy
  • 1st pro-social behaviors – empathy
  • Continued egocentricism
  • Physical aggression & tantrums still replace expressive language
  • Function of tantrums:
    • Self expression (dissatisfaction)
    • Problem solving
  • Emergence of pretend play

• 12-18 Months
  • Empathic concern- sharing the same emotion that another person is experiencing. 
  • 3 properties of human language
  • Semanticity- the capacity of a language to carry meaning
  • Productivity- the ability to express many different meanings with few words
  • Displacement- enables speakers to describe distant or absent objects and communicate abstract notions.
• 18-24 Months
  • Things they do and don't do for both physical and cognitive.
  • Know about peer interactions in this age.
  • Sometime between 18-24 months peer play begins to take on a game-like quality.
  • Given a choice, infants almost always chose a peer over their mother.
  • The very beginnings of lasting relationships (friendship) starts.
• 24-36 Months
  • Categorical Self: the ability of people to identify their own membership in 1 or more conceptual categories (boy, brother, and "I am not a baby anymore!")
  • They are able to categorize pictures accurately according to age and gender (gender labeling)
  • But, gender may be changed by changing clothes hence rigidity in role stereotypes.