During the week, I am constantly reading and researchng and come across cool stuff. I try to share when I can on my Facebook page, but I realized not everyone is on Facebook enough to catch all my shares so I decided to start Food for Thought Friday’s. I’ll share some things that relate to early childhood development, speech and language development, developmental delays, special education, etc. Enjoy, and let me know your thoughts about the different pieces!
Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP)
A couple weeks ago, Amanda from Not Just Cute published this piece on her blog: On Developmentally Appropriate Practice….And Why We Don’t Push Kids Down the Stairs. She parallels the skill of alternating feet up and down stairs to education and developmentally appropriate practice (DAP). It is a short yet brilliant piece that sparked so much conversation that she continued on with a short series on DAP. You can find all the parts to this series on Not Just Cute. Go take a look and come back and tell me you think!
On this same idea of DAP…Do you follow Teacher Tom? He is a preschool teacher who promotes developmentally appropriate practice and play-based learning. I LOVED his post this week where he shared:
Letters and numbers are abstractions from the real world: they represent something real, but they are not real and are therefore too artificial for the concrete brains of most young children to really comprehend. I could, of course drill them to memorize their ABC’s but that’s not the same as learning them. I’d much prefer to work with young children on language development, which is something for which they are genetically programmed. And there’s no better way to do that than by having lots of conversations with them on a variety of topics, which is simply fun. I like to toss in new words when appropriate to expand vocabulary, practice silly rhyming, and encourage them to tell me stories — anything to get them using their language “muscle.” I’ve never met a child who did not enjoy this because it is simply what the human animal is designed to do at this age. It is play.
YAY! A preschool teacher talking about the importance of language. This thrills me! To read the rest, go to this blog post: I Don’t Need to “Teach” Them. It is a great post.
Autism News
The New York Times Well Blog posted about research that a baby’s gaze may signal autism somewhere between 2-6 months of age. The article stated:
The study, published online in the journal Nature, found that infants who later received a diagnosis of began spending less time looking at people’s eyes between 2 and 6 months of age and paid less and less attention to eyes as they grew older. By contrast, babies who did not develop autism looked increasingly at people’s eyes until about 9 months old, and then kept their attention to eyes fairly constant into toddlerhood.
To read the full post, head to The New York Times Well Blog.
All You Need is Love
You may have seen this video going around Facebook. This sweet girl talks about how awesome her brother is with Down Syndrome. Made me bawl like a baby. Worth every second of the 6 minutes to watch. You can check it out on GodVine.
In Case You Forget Why You do What You Do (Fellow SLPs)
This video reminds me why we, as SLP’s, do what we do. Tell me this doesn’t bring tears to your eyes!
Happy Friday!
I love the post from Teacher Tom! This is so good, so real, so true. I am so glad I knew this when my own children were preschoolers.
Thank you so much for including my link, Katie! I love your roundup, and have a particular personal interest in the autism research. Thank you for sharing!