The Developing Mind
For a short time, new babies seem more like small ani mals than future thinking beings. They start out with very few learning tools - some newborn reflexes, their sen sory organs, an immature nervous system and a potent but, thus far, only partially developed brain (pages 56- 57). In the first weeks after birth, it is really a baby's innate reflexes that exert the dominant control; how ever, learning is constantly taking place. Every new expe rience and every person or object a baby encounters helps expand her store of information and lay the ground work for obtaining future knowledge.
The earliest years are a time of unsurpassed intellectual growth. To achieve the simple feat of writing her own name, the five-year-old at righe has mastered a remarkable succession of mental skills, including shape recogni tion, a perception of alphabet letters as a way of commu nicating, the ability to store the letters of her name in memory and to retrieve them, an understanding of the re lationship between written words and language and, not least, a firm and proud sense of her own identity.
This section of the book outlines in chart form these and other developmental achievements: the milestones of cognitive growth that transform a youngster's think ing as she evolves from an infant into a school-age child. To communicate successfully with your youngster throughout these early years, you must constantly re mind yourself that her whole way of thinking is very different from your own. Try to stay in tune with the sometimes narrow, sometimes wildly expansive and often magical ways in which she perceives the world. And as you teach and guide her, be sensitive to the rap idly changing levels at which she is able to learn.
