This document discusses goals and best practices for nurturing early childhood development. It outlines five key areas of development - gross motor skills, fine motor skills, verbal/communication skills, personal/social skills, and problem solving skills. It provides examples of developmental milestones in each area from ages 12 months to 36 months. It also discusses the importance of play, music, art, and other activities in promoting skills across all areas of development. Overall, the document advocates the critical role of early childhood education in laying a strong foundation for learning and school readiness.

1. Nurturing Early Childhood
Development

2. Goals for Early Childhood
Development
Five Areas of Child Development:
•Gross Motor Skills
•Fine Motor Skills
•Verbal/Communication Skills
•Personal/Social Skills
•Problem Solving Skills
Laying the foundation for reading,
writing, and math skills.
Laying the foundation for social
skills.

3. Learning Through Play
• Teaches how things work.
• Teaches how to interact and
share with other children.
• Allows children to enter a
world of imagination.
• Allows children to test things
in a safe way.
• Teaches about emotions
and to talk with others.
• Allows for experimenting
with art.
• Promotes imaginary play.

4. Gross Motor Skills
 12 months will bend over and pick up objects.
 18 months will run and throw a ball underhanded.
 24 months will walk down stairs.
 36 months will begin to hop and skip and ride a tricycle.

5. Gross Motor Development

6. Gross Motor Development

7. Fine Motor Skills
12 months eat with fingers and may begin using a spoon or fork.
18 months will scribble well, and will begin to stack four blocks.
24 months will open doors.
36 months will wiggle thumbs and will begin getting dressed
without help.

8. Four Stages
of Fine
Motor
Development
• Whole arm
• Whole hand
• Pincher
• Pincer
coordination

9. Activities That Promote Fine Motor
Development
• Whole arm
– Under the table art
– Ribbons and rings
– Stir it up
• Whole hand
– Sponge squeeze
– Lid match
– Cornmeal sifting

10. Activities That Promote Fine Motor
Development
• Pincher
– Button drop
– Color transfer
– Using tongs
• Pincer
– Capture the cork
– Locks and keys
– Clip it

11. Fine Motor Skills
• Writing progress depends largely on the
development of fine motor skills involving
small muscle movements of the hand.
• Muscle development for writing is a
comprehensive process that begins with
movements of the whole arm and
progresses toward very detailed fine motor
control at the fingertips.

12. Verbal Communication
 12 months will use two
words skillfully.
 18 months will string
together two word phrases.
 24 - 30 months will use 50
to 70 words, make two to
three word sentences and
can be understood half the
time.
 36 months will carry on a
simple conversation and
use three to four word
sentences. Will use
between 300 and 1000
words.

13. Three Skills
For
Communicati
on
Development
•Understanding
•Interaction
•Listening

14. Learning Through Understanding
• Key to talking and learning.
• Children need to understand what single
words mean and when words are joined
together into sentences.

15. Suggested Understanding Activities
• Instruction Time. Children need to wait for
you to say “go” and when you do they can
run around, but must stop when you say
“stop” and clap your hands. Can be
modified to hop, jump, or any other gross
motor activity. Can be done with music.
• Do what I say. Can be done with a puppet
giving instructions.

16. Learning Through Interaction
• Learning the skills of interaction is really
important for having good conversations.
• We need to learn when to talk, and when
to listen, how to take turns, how to notice if
someone is not listening or bored with
what we are saying. We need words to do
this, but also skills in looking, listening and
noticing people around us.

17. Suggested Interaction Activities
• Playing simple games that require taking
turns.
• Story Time. Share a story and predict
what might happen next listening and
looking at the pictures.
• Get down to the same level as the child.
• Talk about what is happening in a book,
on TV, or what you are observing.

18. Learning Through Listening
Listening is an
essential skill for
talking and learning.

19. Suggested Listening Activities
• Listening treasure box. Collect lots of
things that make a noise. Explore and
listen and talk about them.
• Spot the mistake. Sing a rhyme or song
and make a mistake. Did the child hear
the mistake?
• Go game. Build a tower of blocks, have a
race, roll the ball, and make child wait to
hear “Go” before acting.

20. Ways to Enhance Language
Development
• Reading Predictable Books. Predictable
books are books that are written in a way that
makes it easy to guess what will happen on
the next page. Children learn pre-reading
skills. (Read top to bottom, left to right and
turning pages. Learn story has beginning,
middle and end)
• Children learn rhyme and rhythm
• Children learn inflection.

21. Examples of Predictable Books
• An Egg is an Egg.
• Are You My Mother?
• Don’t Climb Out of the Window Tonight.
• I Went Walking.
• If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
• It Looked Like Spilt Milk.
• My Very Own Octopus.
• This Is the Bear.
• Where Does the Brown Bear Go?
• Who Sank the Boat?
• Who Say That?
• Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you See?
• Llama, Llama books.

22. Books For Infants and Toddlers
• High-contrast books.
Simple bold images.
Possibly no words.
• Board books
• Repetitive text books.
Children feel like they
are the reader.
• Activity books. Peek-a-
boo or sensory touch.
• Bedtime books.

23. Pre-Reading Skills
• Children exposed to language early in life have
social and educational advantages over their
peers. Reading in one of the best ways to expose
children to language.
• Read to your child as often as you can. Try to
have at least one reading time each day.
• Encourage independence by offering a selection
of books and ask your child to choose one.
• Ready slowly to promote understanding.
• Read expressively using different voices for
characters and raising/lowering your voice.

24. Pre-Reading Skills Continued
• Use puppets, finger plays, or props while you
read.
• Encourage your toddler to clap or sing while
you read sing-song books.
• Talk about the illustrations – point to items
and name them. Ask your child to name
them with you.
• Ask open-ended questions like ”Why do you
think the lion is going into the woods?” or
“What do you think will happen next?”

25. Recommended Websites
•www.pbs.org/parents/bookfinder
•www.naeyc.org Click on “For Families” tab

26. Personal-Social Skills
12 months will offer toy if you ask for it, even if child does not let
go.
18 months will play with a doll or stuffed animal by hugging it.
24 months will drink from a cup, and set it down, without spilling.
36 months will push a wagon, stroller, or a toy on wheels steering
it around objects and backing it out of corners.

27. Problem Solving
 12 months will begin to hold an item in each hand, and clap
the toys together.
 18 months will drop several small toys into a container.
 24 months will see a crumb in a small, clear bottle, and child
will turn over the bottle to dump out the crumb.
 36 months will watch four objects being lined up and will

28. Did You Know Music Is Beneficial:
• Because it is often shared with others in singing,
dancing, and playing instruments together, it is
often a social experience?
• Develops physical skills through movement, finger
plays, body awareness, and bilateral coordination
(crossing the midline)?
• Develops cognitive skills through counting songs,
rhyme and repetition, steady beat, and memory?
• Assisting the development of language and
literacy through spoken language, receptive
language and phonemic awareness?

29.
Did You Know That Painting
At The Easel:
• Strengthens the muscles
of the shoulder, arm, and
hand?
• Helps to develop
eye/hand coordination?
• Helps to develop small
motor skills?
• Creates better hand and
wrist position by using a
vertical surface?

30. Did You Know Playing With Flubber
And Play Dough:
• Allows for inclusion into a
group activity that allows
for parallel play?
• Strengthens the small
muscles of the hand,
which is a pre-writing
skill?
• Improves hand/eye
coordination?
• Encourages imaginative
play?
• Stimulates vocabulary
development, especially
descriptive adjectives?

31. Did You Know Playing With
Beads:
• Improves eye-hand
coordination?
• Encourages vocabulary
building, especially with
colors and shapes?
• Increases math skills
with concepts like, “little
vs lot”, and counting
beads?

32. Early Childhood Education
Brain science tells us the most significant
learning begins at birth, not kindergarten.
To improve K-12, we must create a
seamless system that supplies elementary
schools with children ready to learn, and
that means early childhood education – not
babysitting.

33. Statistics
• By the time an average child whose parents are
on welfare reaches age 4, she has heard 32
million fewer words than a child of professional
parents according to a 1995 study by researchers
at the University of Kansas.
• Kindergarten teachers when surveyed about
which skills are most important for entering
kindergartners to experience success, teachers
gave as their top answers abilities like self-care,
and motor skills, followed closely by self-
regulation.

34. Soft Skills
In a measure of self-regulation called the Head-
to-Toes Task, preschool and kindergarten age
children are instructed to touch their toes when
asked to touch their head, and to touch their
head when asked to touch their toes. This
simple task combine three core elements of
self-regulation: attention, working memory, and
impulse control. Young children who
performed well on this task in the Fall had
markedly higher test scores in math and
reading the next Spring.

35. Childcare Facts
• In 2012 in state of Florida:
• Children ages birth to 41,079,012
• Children ages 5 to 11 1,519,285
• Total Families with Children 1,842,338
• Single Parent Families 655,581
• Families in Poverty 356,913