The answer to last week’s question, “By age 3, about how many words are children able to understand?”
Is 20,000 words!
This week’s trivia question is:
An infant’s brain is 25% of its adult weight at birth, how much of its adult weight is the brain by age 3?
Tune in next week to find out the answer to this week’s question!
Angie is a research assistant for UConn KIDS. She is a senior Psychological Sciences major, minoring in Human Development & Family Sciences in the Early Childhood Specializations program. After graduating, she plans on attending graduate school to become a counselor for young children and their families. She is involved with the University Ballet Company on campus and Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology.
Angie is eager to be a research assistant this semester because she loves to help the supporting of children and their development, and we are so excited for her to be here!
The answer to last week’s question, “At what age is the brain fully developed?”
Is 20-30 years old!
This week’s trivia question is:
By age 3, about how many words are children able to understand?
Tune in next week to find out the answer to this week’s question!
Talking to young children is more important than you’d think. Talking to infants and toddlers will help promote linguistic nutrition and mental exercise that will help build the child’s brain and intelligence. Talking to young children is something beneficial for their brain development and is something families can do despite their socioeconomic status.
Hearing language is the basis of oral language skills which are fundamental to intelligence. Although babies aren’t able to talk back, it’s important that they’re hearing language around them. Oral language provides children with an important tool for thought and without fluent and structured oral language, it will be difficult for children to think as they get older.
Dialogue, like narrating an infant or toddler’s play, can really help oral language development. It doesn’t have to be excessive or complicated language, rather it’s better to use simple language that corresponds to things in the child’s daily life, such as toys or changing their diaper.
The first thousand days of life are a period of a vast amount of learning that families should take advantage of to empower them to help, support, and nourish their children’s brain development. Babies are born ready to learn but they’ll only achieve their full potential with support from their families.
If you want to read more, click here!
Angelina Stofka
UConn KIDS, Research Assistant
Screen time for children is a tricky topic since we’re entering such a predominant technological world. It’s hard to not utilize screens when engaging and raising young children nowadays, which makes it important to learn how to do this in a healthy way. There are ways to positively promote child health and development in the digital world. Four evidence-based principles are minimizing, mitigating, mindfully using, and modelling healthy use of screens.
Minimizing the use of screens is always recommended. It’s not recommended for children younger than 2 years old to use screens, and for children 2-5 years old, it’s recommended about 1 hour or less of screen time. It’s also recommended to avoid screens 1 hour before bedtime and to maintain daily screen-free times like family meals and book-sharing.
Another principle for healthy use of screens is mitigating the risks associated with screentime. One way to do this is to be present and engaged when screens are being used, so it’s important that children aren’t using screens by themselves. Another way to mitigate risks is to encourage the use of screens for creative activities like drawing rather than passive viewing. Curating and monitoring young children’s media are something else that could help.
Being mindful about the use of screen time is another important principle for healthy use of screens. Creating a plan for when, how, and where screens may and may not be used could help with this as well as prioritizing shared family media use like watching television or movies together, rather than having children play or watch by themselves.
The last principle for healthy use of screens is that adults should model health screen use. They can do this by encouraging and participating in activities that don’t involve screens like shared reading, outdoor play, board games, and crafts. It’s also important to turn off devices during family time at and away from home as well as when not in use and avoid background television.
If you want to read more, click here!
Angelina Stofka
UConn KIDS, Research Assistant
Montessori classrooms have become more popular and known overtime and have become one of the preferred ways of arranging and conducting classrooms for preschools. The Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) is the most used observation system used in research, practice, and policy to look at classroom process quality. CLASS focuses mostly on teacher-child interactions as the site of learning, and Montessori classrooms focuses mostly on child-environment interactions, which might cause Montessori classrooms to score lower than conventional classrooms on CLASS.
Montessori preschool classrooms tend to have more students, causing a higher child to teacher ratio, which may not seem efficient to some people. However, these classrooms see that children’s development and learning occur not only through teacher to child interactions, but through a relationship between the child, the environment, and the teacher. This is not something that CLASS typically looks at but is shown to be effective in children’s development.
Montessori preschool classrooms with larger class sizes had higher emotional support and classroom organization than conventional classrooms using CLASS. They also found that classrooms with higher child to adult ratios lead to higher instructional support. This goes to show the advantages of Montessori classrooms that CLASS observations might miss!
If you want to read more, click here!
Angelina Stofka
UConn KIDS, Research Assistant