Parents of young babies:
Dear Practica Parents,
You will notice, as you read through the monthly sections of
the Practica Parents’ Guide, that we often refer to your baby’s “midline” and
what you can expect in terms of him crossing that midline. (The midline is the
imaginary line that divides the body into right and left halves.)
During the first months, it’s exciting to witness a baby
learning to turn his head all the way from side to side at will. This is an
important milestone, as the right hemisphere of his little brain is learning to
control the left side of his body and vice versa, and these two hemispheres are
initially unable to communicate with each other.
Over time, as neural pathways develop between the left and
right hemispheres your baby will get better at coordinating the movements of
his hands to explore objects. By the onset of the second half of the first year
of life, he will be practising to pass a toy from one hand to the other. At first,
this newly emerging ability will make it easier for him handle and turn toys as
he explores them. Later on, it will help him to solve a problem.
Encourage this by deliberately creating situations from
about 8-9 months that confronts your child with a problem that can be solved by
transferring an object from one hand to the other. When he is holding a snack
in his right hand, and you offer him a toy on that side, you’re creating an
opportunity for him to learn that he can make the occupied hand available to
receive the desired object by intentionally transferring the snack to the other
hand.
However, seeing that this post is aimed at parents with
young babies, here’s a fun game that is listed for 3-month-old babies:
- Activity 215-216 from the Practica Parents’ Guide:
- Tip 1: The constant background noise of a television or radio makes it difficult to develop a number of important listening skills. Therefore, eliminate background noise when you play this game. Turn the television off altogether.
- Tip 2: Music is brain food, so enrich your baby’s day with listening to various genres of music. However, divide the experience into shorter sessions of about 30 minutes each - to make sure that he doesn’t learn to disregard music as background noise. Also, from time to time, help focus his attention on the music by tapping the beat on his back, singing along and dancing to the music while holding him.
This activity also develops important listening skills. This
is significant because, the very same regions in our brains that are being
wired to process everyday sounds gradually become more and more involved in
helping to process music and speech sounds.
Naturally, for these regions to be wired for future
learning, babies need to gradually develop a number of interesting abilities:
not only do they need to learn to pay attention to important sounds and ignore
others, they also need to learn to notice differences between certain sounds,
remember these differences, attach meaning to them and learn to reproduce them.
During the second year of
life, you will catch your child doing increasingly clever things that involves
using both sides of the body – like holding a bottle with one hand and dropping
little objects into its opening with the other. He will eventually learn to
catch and throw balls, thread various kinds of shapes from his Practica box
onto laces, and, when he is around 4 years old, you will be amazed at how
smoothly he turns a piece of paper with his non-dominant hand whilst
simultaneously opening and closing the blades of a pair of scissors with his
dominant hand. What a feat!
You will be encountering
numerous activity ideas aimed at developing “laterality” as you progress
through the pages of your Practica Guide. This is a term that we use that
encompasses what many therapists refer to as “bilateral integration” – in other
words, learning to coordinate the two halves of the body.
Written by Lizette van Huyssteen
"When we know better... we do better."
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