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Applying What You Know About Child Development to Your Classroom
Directions:  Read each statement in Column 1 to review examples of what children are like in each of the four areas of development.  List and explain strategies/activities that are responsive to each statement and record your answers in Column 2.
Grading:  Responses need to be developmentally appropriate and explain how it connects or address that developmental characteristic.  Simply listing an activity or strategy is not acceptable.
Child Development Characteristics | How Teachers Can Respond

Social/Emotional Development:
Learning to Get Along with Others

Take Initiative

Express Feelings in Actions and Words

•	To help the child get along with others, teachers can teach the relationship skills that help the child to establish and also maintain rewarding and healthy relationships with diversified groups and people.
•	To take initiative, teachers train children how to make responsible decisions- making respectful and constructive choices concerning social interactions and personal behavior according to social norms, ethics, etc. 
•	Expressing feelings & actions needs the teacher to teach the children about self-awareness such that the children can accurately recognize their thoughts, emotions, and how they affect their behavior.

Physical Development:
Enjoy moving the large muscles of the body

Like doing puzzles and putting things together

Tire Easily

•	Children will enjoy moving the large muscles in their bodies when the teacher teaches them the gross motor skills. Such skills involve activities like crawling and walking that enhance cognitive development.
•	A teacher can sensory systems to children that solve the puzzles of hearing and vision that help the children to develop adaptive capacities.
•	To help the children from tiring easily, teachers can teach them about the importance of health and nutrition. Teaching children about the importance of a balanced diet will make them grow healthy.

Cognitive Development:
Use all of their senses to learn

Use their imaginations and are creative in their thinking

Learn to identify, compare, match and classify by color, shape and size

•	A teacher can use statistics of syllables to teach children. This will increase the attention time that serves to measure how the children understand what is being taught.
•	To make the children use their imaginations and be creative in how they think, teachers can use sampling statistics in their teaching. Sampling statistics is very sensitive to children because they make children to stay tuned to all the regularities they observe and help them make predictions and draw inferences according to what they observe.
•	Teachers can teach children how to identify, compare, etc. by helping them to distinguish the causal variables using exploratory plays and using the causality understanding in solving problems. Sch activities impose memory requirements in the children’s minds.

Language Development:
Use language to think, learn, imagine, plan, make requests, direct others, and solve problems

Can retell stories and recite favorite parts of books and songs

Explore and use writing

•	Teachers need to do a lot of talking with the children to boost their language development and speech by looking at what interests the children most. 
•	Teachers should read a lot of books with the children to help them retell stories because reading helps children to hear words from different contexts. 
•	Teachers should exercise everyday talking about what is taking place in their daily life to help the children understand the meanings of different words.