Developmental Milestones

Making sure your child is on track for success is as easy as remembering this simple phrase: screen early, screen often. A screening observes how your child is growing to ensure he/she is meeting expected milestones. Participating in a screening can help guarantee that your child will not fall behind because of a developmental delay. Below are the general categories that early childhood professionals and pediatricians check to ensure a child is on track for success. If you would like to schedule your child for a developmental screen, please click here.

Physical Development

During their first five years, young children undergo more rapid and dramatic changes in their physical development than at any other time in their lives. Changes in body proportion, coordination, and strength occur, as does increasingly complex brain development. Children develop remarkable physical, motor, and sensory capacities that enhance exploration and mastery of the environment.
• Health and Wellbeing
• Motor Development

Approaches to Learning

Approaches to Learning is a unique and critical domain of children’s development. Although each of the other domains of development reflects specific content knowledge that document what children know and do, Approaches to Learning is not about specific content knowledge. Instead, it addresses how children deal with new environments, interactions, and discoveries. Approaches to Learning describes children’s attitudes and dispositions toward learning.
• Eagerness and Curiosity
• Persistence
• Creativity and Inventiveness
• Planning and Reflection

Social and Emotional Development

As children grow, their ability to establish relationships with peers and with additional adults influences how they view themselves and the world. Positive and adaptive social behaviors result from interacting with others who have different characteristics and backgrounds. With the help of supportive adults, young children expand their capacities to recognize and express their own feelings, and to understand and respond to the emotions of others.
• Emotional Functioning
• Managing Emotions
• Building and Maintaining Relationships with Adults and Peers
• Sense of Identity and Belonging

Language and Literacy

Language, communication, and early literacy and writing are critical to children’s ability to learn, work, and play with others. Language and literacy development involves the way children learn to communicate with sounds, words and gestures, and eventually, the way they learn to read and write. Children develop language and literacy through interactions with adults and other children, engagement with materials and instructional experiences.
• Listening and Understanding
• Speaking
• Vocabulary
• Sentences and structure
• Conversation
• Emergent Reading
• Emergent Writing

Mathematical Thinking

Mathematics is everywhere and it helps children make sense of their world. Children learn by observing and interacting with their environment and are naturally curious about number and mathematical concepts. Children’s development of mathematical understanding begins in the very first months of life and continues to grow and expand as they interact with others and with the world around them. For young children, math is about number knowledge, patterns, size, shape awareness, and the relationship between objects and space.
• Number Sense
• Number and Operations
• Patterns
• Geometry
• Spatial Relations
• Measurement and Data

Scientific Inquiry

Scientific inquiry addresses children exploring the world around them. Children are natural investigators and their levels of understanding deepen over time with varied experiences. Exploration and discovery are ways that young children learn about their worlds by first using their senses and reflexes. The initial spontaneous responses of infants become more purposeful as they gain mobility. The expanding physical and motor capacities of toddlers enable them to engage in ever-widening explorations which can promote new brain connections.

• Scientific Inquiry through Exploration and Discovery
• Life Science
• Physical Science
• Earth and Space Science
• Environment
• Engineering and Technology

Social Studies

In the earliest years, social studies concepts simply involve children exploring their world and trying to make sense of the social and physical environments. Social interactions form the basis of social studies, therefore in the early childhood arena, each child’s basic social understanding begins with self and family then expands to early education. A sensitive, respectful approach sets the tone for a child’s social learning.
• Culture
• Individual Development and Identity
• Individuals and Groups
• Spaces, Places and Environments
• Time, Continuity, and Change
• Governance, Civic Ideals and Practices
• Economics and Resources
• Technology and Our World

Creative Expression Through the Arts

Creative Expression Through the Arts, provides children with opportunities to express ideas and feelings, use words, manipulate tools and media, and solve problems Through the arts, children learn to express what they know, pursue their own interests and abilities and appreciate the contributions of others. They begin to understand that others can be creative in different ways and show appreciation for these differences by asking questions and commenting.
• Sensory Art Experience
• Music
• Creative Movement
• Imaginative and Creative Play
• Appreciation of the Arts

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