subject: Child Development - Developing The Brain Of Your Child [print this page] Your Baby's brain development is directly linked to movement. Research has established relationship between movement experiences and overall neural pathway building in the brain.
To increase brain activity and thus brain development, your Baby needs to have consistent and repeated experiences, be it the finger play, or exercise, or when she is rocked and sung the lullaby. Here are some ideas for you to 'move' your Baby, so that she gains the stimulation for brain development.
When holding baby, find different ways to hold her so that she gets different perspectives and experience different positions. This develops different neural connections in the brain as it adjusts to the different feeling of gravity and balance, and Baby gains different visual angles perspectives.
Allow Baby to touch, feel and handle different objects, as long as these objects are clean and child-safe. She is likely to put it in her mouth. This is fine because many sensory nerves are centered around the mouth, and Baby explores things as much this way as they do with their hands.
When Baby interacts with a sound making object like a egg shakers, he is beginning to understand the physical characteristics of the object such as shape, texture, size , and colour. Through action schemes such as shaking or knocking the shaker, she is internalizing what causes something to happen. By interacting with the egg shaker, a sound is produced. Baby will understand cause and effect and anticipate the same consequence when she shakes the egg shaker again.
Every baby has a set of action schemes which she employs while exploring objects in her environment. These might include sharing, reaching, hitting, throwing, mouthing, kicking, or others. Baby's action schemes evolve over time, but on any given day, she has a set of familiar action schemes. Increase the action scheme for Baby by labeling the action, and encourage the same action to be used by repeating it several times. Baby's brain will then store these words and associated actions, which will aid in Baby's greater exploratory ideas.
Being allowed to explore and experiment within safe limits is of extreme importance to brain development. Those babies who are allowed to explore generally tend to become eager and flexible learners.
Play a hide-and-seek game with Baby. When Baby begins to search for a hidden object, this indicates that Baby remembers that the object continues to exist even though it cannot be seen. Object permanence is a learnt knowledge. It puts in place memory of things seen but out of sight.
Baby enjoys "stop and go" games such as moving to music and stopping when the music pauses. The element of surprise delights her at first. As she becomes familiar with the activity, she will enjoy anticipating the stops and starts, understanding the structure of the music in much the same way as she understands spoken language prior to speaking it. Don't have music that starts and stops? Just sing your favourite song and stop unexpectedly, or at the end of a phrase. Wait a few seconds and resume.
Established patterns and routines are important to Baby. Anticipation occurs when Baby associates certain events to other preceding events. Certain visual and aural cues can alert Baby to a familiar pattern.
by: Cheow Yu Yuan
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