Logo

See What Children Know

A one-month-old child makes sounds and moves to indicate how she feels.   An observant parent can “read” the infant’s internal states and supply what is needed to calm the infant, so credit for the communication goes to the parent.  The infant is just doing what is natural – crying or smiling, fretting or laughing.  Eventually infants learn the connection: “If I cry, I will be fed”. but that is not the same as realizing someone out there understands the message. So, when do deliberate attempts to communicate to a listener begin and how do these strategies change with maturity? If we see a twelve-month-old point at a dog while looking at her parent, we can feel more comfortable saying the child has an intention to communicate, to share a referent with someone else who has a mind and thus can understand the child’s communication intent.

We have used our Videatives library to create a playlist that illustrates how children’s assumptions about communication change as they mature.  (Note – If you have a subscription to the Video Streaming Service, you too can create playlists that illustrate comparisons of interest to you)  Click here to see the video clips that we have selected to show children’s language development.

Notes from the Field

The following is taken from an email that Bonnie Blagojevic sent to the ECE Tech List:

In the spirit of sharing new resources, together with colleagues from our Early Reading First grant in Maine, our article Young Children and Computers: Storytelling and Learning in a Digital Age – Expanded Version was just published and is available as a link from http://www.naeyc.org/tyc/

This summer, if you have not yet checked out our Diigo group at http://groups.diigo.com/group/ecetech please take a look and join us. I have a set of sign on instructions for Diigo/our group- if you are interested, email me directly at Bonnie_Blagojevic@UMIT.MAINE.EDU and I will send them along to you. Some of the tags we use in our Diigo group, such as techchildren, techeducators, techresearch correspond to the sections of our website, and provide another way to help our volunteers discover new resources to consider for future updates. We welcome your involvement!