A child’s early months are vital for the good progression of developmental skills.
A high-quality infant education program puts the focus onto learning and interaction that’s suitable for the child’s age and current development progress. Here are some simple infant activities you can do at home to promote the development of your child’s visual, language, and motor skills.
Listening To Language
Before your baby speaks, they listen.
They notice pitch, volume, and they even learn to recognize a few of the words that you speak. Incorporating dramatic language features during storytime stimulates your child’s language learning ability. They’ll follow along with the story with your voice, even if they don’t quite understand the meaning yet.
When reading books or telling stories, make sure to direct your speech towards your child. Actively engage with them by speaking in different voices, mirroring their expressions, and even using some toys as props for your storytelling.
Slowly Sitting Up
For children who have already developed head control, this is a wonderful exercise to aid mobility and help them get comfortable sitting up.
While your child is lying on their back, gently hold them under their arms and slowly pull them into an upright sitting position. Doing this a few times a day helps improve muscle tone, motor skills, and head control, all while showing them how they can reposition themselves between lying down and sitting up. As they get stronger, you’ll only need to hold their hands while they sit up, and eventually, they’ll be doing this by themselves!
Searching For Toys
As your baby grows, you’ll notice their eyesight improving as they begin to track people or items around the room. This easy visual activity helps a baby get acquainted with their surroundings, keeping them interested and improving their visual tracking skills.
Choose a colorful soft toy to hold in front of your child, and make sure that it gets their attention. Slowly move it around in front of them, and watch as your child’s eyes follow the toy around. Start by moving the toy side to side, but as you play feel free to get more creative with your movements. Soon, your child’s hands will start reaching for the toy as they’re tracking it with their eyes.
Flying Scarves
Hand-eye coordination is a vital developmental skill learned in a child’s early months, and children will always be excited to reach out for something colorful.
Take a few light scarves or thin fabric pieces, such as soft chiffon, and let them fall and float around your child’s head. They’ll use the visual tracking skills they’ve learned with other play activities, and they’ll work on their motor skills as they reach out to grasp the fabric pieces.
Rice Rattle
The more they play, the more infants learn how their actions can cause visual or auditory effects.
Take a clear and empty bottle and fill it with brightly colored rice or pasta, sealing the cap back on tightly so that your child can’t twist it lose. As they play with these shakers, they’ll learn about how the contents of the bottle move and mix together, and they’ll begin to discern between the sounds of gently tilting the bottle against shaking it.
You can really get creative with this activity! Fill several bottles with different contents, all of which make different sounds. You can put more rice in one than in another, and without even knowing it you’re fostering logical thinking skills in your child.
Stacking Skills
Older infants will have already begun to experiment with their toys during playtime. Blocks, toy cars, and stuffed toys will have been balanced against each other or mixed in some way. This is an exercise best led by example: sit down with your child and begin to stack blocks, plastic cups, or small cardboard boxes. They should all be slightly different in size, some big and some small. As children begin to stack the items together, they’ll learn basic problem-solving skills and improve their motor skills.
Infant Development At Providence Children’s Academy
At Providence Children’s Academy, we know that every child develops at their own pace. We work with each infant individually to develop the skills they need to keep on exploring the world around them. In our infant daycare, children interact with each other through play, learning vital socialization skills along with achieving their own developmental goals.
Contact us today for a tour of our academy, and let us work with you to provide quality education and skills development for your child.