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In today's day and age, with the increasing exposure of parents and policy makers to
developmental psychology and related fields, it has become vital that the classroom be
treated as a place where an all-round development of the children can take place.
Before we start discussing the importance of the study of child development, we first
need to understand to what extent a child's development pertains to.
Child development loosely refers to the full scope of skills that a child masters over time
to become a well-adjusted adult in the society. These include 5 main areas in which
these skills could be divided:
1. Physical or Motor skills: the ability to use their body according to their
wish to perform simple tasks, these can fine motor skills relating to use of
fingers to write, draw or build, or gross motor skills where they use their
whole bodies to play, dance, and perform other athletic activities.
2. Social and Emotional skills: the ability to appropriately interact with
other people and the learning to master self-control and self-restraint.
3. Cognitive and Mental skills: the ability to learn new things, remember
information and solve problems.
4. Speech and Language skills: the ability to be able to effectively
communicate through reading, listening, speaking and writing.
5. Sensory Awareness skills: the ability to register sensory information
and learning appropriate responses to various stimuli.
When you are a teacher dealing with a roomful of children with a slew of different
educational and learning needs, it is of extreme importance that you have a good
idea of matters pertaining to child development.
Even though every child learns and grows at his/her own pace, there are
certain generalities relating to child development that give an idea of how a
child of a certain age group is supposed to perform at different tasks.
These general markers of child development can help effectively observe the
progress of children in a classroom.
Teachers need to closely watch for these markers of development
to make sure the children meet their developmental milestones.
These developmental milestones are a loose set of skills that most children of
a certain age seem to master at roughly the same time. These act as useful
milestones to ensure ideal development.
Apart from ensuring that a child is on the right track, another important aspect of
observing the development of children is the early identification of any disorders that a
child might be suffering from.
Not every student is going to be able to grasp everything at exactly the same
speed.
Having
identified the needs of individual students, teachers can plan their
lessons accordingly, keeping in mind that they have to engage the brightest
mind and carry the slowest at the same time as well.
If a teacher is too slow, there is a likelihood that he/she might lose his/her
best student because the student is too bored. That being said, however, if
the teacher goes too fast, he/she might lose his/her slow students because
they cannot keep up with the teacher.
A teacher has a very important task of not only educating young minds in
worldly knowledge, but to ensure proper all-around development of every
student in the classroom.
Teachers are an important and influential part of a child's development.
Suffice it to say that the study of child development is a necessary part of
the duties of a teacher.
Additional References:
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fullte...
https://www.verywellmind.com/chi...
https://childdevelopment.com.au/...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/...
http://www.allpsychologycareers....
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Journey through the ages and create a mighty empire in this award-winning game.
1. Cognitive development
2. Social and emotional development
3. Speech and language development
4. Fine motor skill development
5. Gross motor skill development
Neglecting just one of the five is detrimental to the growth and health of a child. So it’s
necessary that child development is included in the formal training for teachers.
Reference: Kidslearningthroughplay.com[1]
Footnotes
[1] What Is Child Development? - Kids Learning Through Play
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Luis Maimoni, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist at Masada Homes (2013-present)
Answered Mar 2, 2018 · Author has 964 answers and 196.9k answer views
Because the child’s stage of development has a huge impact on how the child learns.
Also, cognitive abilities of a 5 year old, a 10 year old, and a 15 year old are vastly
different, so what they can learn differs. Finally, understanding child development will
help that teacher understand what, actually, is being taught to pre-school children vs.
elementary vs. middle school vs. high school.
Understanding child development provides the context for the answers to all of these
issues. Teachers shouldn’t try to teach without a basic understanding of child
development. If they’re successful teachers, they’ll learn a lot about child development
as their careers progress from the experience of seeing what works, and what doesn’t.
Each child is unique and learn in a different pace. A child may excel in academics but
not on his behaviour or vice versa. Still others may not excel on both and needs
improvement.
This is also a way for them to know how to properly discipline them if they are
misbehaving. They could make a behavioural assessment plan and implement it through
behavioural charts and Time-outs.
When designing curriculum the following factors are taken into account:
The Objectives - are the short term steps taken in order to achieve the end goals.
The Evaluation- is the assessment done (in various forms) at the end of a defined
period (semester, annual, etc.)
16 year olds can connect things to each other to support the main topics. That’s why they
have you write all those essays. An 8 year old is not yet fully capable of that.
A video I watched showed the difference between an 8 yr old and a 16 yr old and how
they answered the question: “What would happen if we didn’t have thumbs?”
The 8 year old was an 8 year old and said that people could no longer have thumb wars.
The 16 year old mentioned a friend’s observation on how most everything is built for
right-handed people. He connected that to everything that is right-handed: Desks,
doors, even stationery and writing utensils.
To the 8 year old, the rules of a game were changed. To the teenager, the whole world
would be affected.
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