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Zuri, one year old, has a pet dog. You will see it cross the foreground in this video. She also has two stuffed animal toys, a tiger and a dog. She makes some moves that make us believe that she expects her toy tiger to keep walking after she nudges it forward. Or is she simply making the toy move as children so often do in pretend play to simulate walking? We have a true challenge here to make our best guess about what Zuri is thinking. To decide, we will compare what she does with what she does not do, a common strategy we use at Videatives.

Imagine the number of times Kaia has listened to the story represented by the words and pictures in this book about a duck that, as she relates to her friend, “last night wakes up and she was sick, … (Kaia turns the page) … and she got to bed again.” One wonders if the length of her sentences and the complexity of her syntax would be equaled in her everyday conversations. Let’s think for a moment about how a well-known story in pictures advances language development.

A young child is intrigued when an object sticks to her fingers. The object looks normal. It should fall from her fingers when released. Sticky objects present surprises, like two magnets that repel, large empty detergent jugs that are not heavy, a long block with a hidden weight at the end so that it does not balance in the middle. These surprises cause children to rethink their assumptions about how the physical world works. We can use the surprise nature of sticky surfaces as the reason to include them in the preschool.

Respect Boundaries: Promote Self-Other Awareness (age: 15 months) In this video clip, Diego (on the right, seated beside teacher) and John (on the right, wearing an orange shirt) are confused about whose clay is whose. The teacher helps reorient Diego by saying, “Diego, that’s John’s work. Here’s Diego’s clay. Here’s Diego’s clay.” The teacher works to increase the toddlers’ social knowledge about enjoying participation in a group while respecting each group member’s work.

The two children in this video are working together to write the date on the meeting board. Harriet, in the tie-dye shirt, is dictating the letters of the word, “January” to Lauren, in the pink coat. Harriet points to and calls out each letter in the sequence: J-A-N-U-A-R-Y. Lauren writes each letter as called. She accepts some looseness in her “U” that looks more like an “O.” But her “Y" gives her pause. She tries a couple of times to rewrite it, stating, “That’s not a ‘Y’.

The following video clips capture a social interaction between Talia, 12 months old and Brady, 2½ years old. Brady’s teacher took the first clip as she observed their interactions from a distance. Talia’s teacher took the second clip as Talia was sitting in her lap. Both clips reveal interesting perspectives. The encounter begins when Brady approaches Talia, gently touching her hair and patting her back. He then bends down to be at eye level with her. As the interaction continues, Brady touches Talia’s face, arms, legs and feet.

Some problems require that the child realize that fixing one thing might at the same time undo something that was previously fixed. We saw this in “Leaving the Loop,” where the child eventually realized that using his left hand to take the glue off his right hand created a problem by having the glue now stuck to his left hand. How does the child adjust to the back and forth of creating a problem by solving a problem? In the case of “Leaving the Loop,” the child used his mouth to get the glue off his finger.

22 Months – Marking the Beat At 22 months, Zenia is dancing on beat. At first she hops with both feet to punctuate the beat she hears. Then she shifts to a sort of exaggerated stepping action, using the down step of one foot at a time to mark the beat. Perhaps she senses that a dance has more than one type of movement. 30 Months – Capturing the Form Eight months later, Zenia is not as concerned with marking the beat as she is in creating the shape of a movement; in this case, shaking her calf while her thigh is lifted.

It takes careful thinking for a child to thread a looped string and pull it tight to create a knot. Children begin this learning process in stages, first making a loop without threading one end through its center, pulling tight, only to see the string flat again. In this video clip we see four children apply this and other strategies that all make some sense, even if they don’t quite tie the knot. Watch Ayla work to keep a bead from falling off Tucker’s necklace. She pushes the bead far from the end as if that is part of the solution.

Words neither look nor sound like their referent. The shape of the letters C A T does not hint at what the word means. Saying "cat" is not the same as saying "meow." We understand such symbols only by participating in social discourse with others who have learned these words. The words are a type of social contract, an agreement to accept the dictionary meaning. Other symbols contain in their visual form or sound some hint at what they mean. These symbols are called icons, such as a drawing or a voiced noise ("meow") frequently heard in the presence of the referent.