Articles

What is visual stimulation? And what makes it so important in early years? 

Children make connections and learn a lot about the world through their eyes and they will rely on their visual skills to recognise familiar people, make discoveries about their environment, and keep themselves safe.[1]  

There is no one simple answer to this question. It can be explained as a child's growing ability to control their emotions, ideas, and behaviour in order to act positively. It is also the ability to adjust behaviour to meet the situation they are in or have been presented with. When children are young, they do not know how to regulate their feelings and they cannot make sense of their feelings or how to express them.  

A lot of the time when we hear the term ‘problem-solving’, our brain jumps back to the tricky maths teasers from our school days, and we immediately recoil a little. However, problem-solving is much more than number conundrums.  

The term ‘messy play’ often conjures up images of primary-coloured paints splattered on the walls and children with jelly in their hair. It can just sound a lot like a way of handing over the contents of the kitchen cupboard and its surroundings to your child and leaving them to it. However, there is much more to it than the perceived chaos at the kitchen table!

The first few years of a child's life are when they are developing their early skills across many areas. During this stage, a child will be discovering all about themselves and others, and growing their social and emotional skills. During a child’s early social and emotional development, there are many factors that can have an effect, both positively and negatively. In this summary, we’ll be detailing these factors, that usually fall into two categories – environmental and within the child. We’ll also be detailing wider ideas that are good to know, like why children’s mental health is important, emotional changes as they transition in life, and how to help if you think a child is at risk.

When you think of grammar, your first thought might be punctuating sentences in an English lesson or some discussion about why children at primary school need to know about fronted adverbials. (Whatever that means!) However, our understanding of grammar begins a long time before we start school, with even babies noticing and learning about the grammar used in the languages spoken around them.  

Here at My First Five Years, we know how important it is to empower parents with knowledge about speech development. We consider speech to be one of the most important parts of a child’s development journey. It’s a process that begins before birth as your baby listens to the sounds around them in the womb! As your baby is born and grows, this development continues supports them to communicate as they use words to represent objects and experiences. Let’s not forget also that your baby’s language development is a source of great excitement for you, the parent; as they move from making sounds to the amazing moment when they utter their first word!  

As your precious child starts to grow, so to their motor skills begin to develop. When a baby is born, their muscle development starts in their head and neck. As they develop the ability to move and control these, they will then progress onto the large muscles in the body such as their core, legs, and arms. It is likely that when your child reaches the age of two, they will be able to walk and run, and their gross motor muscles will continue to improve and refine throughout their childhood. 

When we think about creativity, we often think about creative arts such as dance, sculpture, painting and drawing, but it is also possible to be creative in scientific ways. Creative-scientific explorations can involve problem-solving, testing an idea to see if it works or is true, investigating, discovering and inventing. Creativity was traditionally thought to be limited to a special set of ‘creative’ people, but we can all be creative given the opportunity.