About Learning to Communicate
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Understanding of the world skills
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To your baby play is not a special time to sit down with toys. Play is everything he does whenever he is awake. He is learning about his world through exploring. |
Understanding of the world
What your baby knows about the world has a major effect on his communication skills.
Initially your baby is like an observer, just watching what is happening around him.
By four months, your baby is starting to interact more with his world. He is beginning to learn about relationships between things and is beginning to realise that he can cause things to happen.
There are several important skills that your baby will learn in order to develop an understanding of the world in which he lives and that are critical for the development of communication skills.
These are:
- object permanence
- cause and effect
- problem solving
- imitation
- play
Object permanence
This is a fancy name for knowing that things still exist when we can no longer see, hear or touch them.
Cause and effect
This refers to your baby learning that by his actions he can have an effect on his world. For example, when he cries you come and pick him up or when he makes a noise you talk to him.
Problem solving
As your baby’s understanding of the world develops and he begins to understand cause and effect relationships, he also begins to solve problems. This includes ‘How can I get things that I want?’
He will start to develop goals - or things that he wants.
Problem solving is basic to our communication. It is through communication that we achieve many of our goals.
Imitation
It is through imitation that your baby learns the words that we use to communicate to each other.
Initially he will learn to copy simple actions such as banging, shaking a rattle, splashing in the bath – Later he will progress to copying simple sounds that you make like bububub
Play
Your baby explores and learns about his world through play.
Early on your baby’s play with objects is limited to a few actions such as hitting, holding our mouthing.
Soon he will start to shake and bang rattles and other noise-makers.
Gradually his play will become more complex. In this way he is gradually building up information in his memory bank about these objects and what they can do.
To your baby play is not a special time to sit down with toys. Play is everything he does whenever he is awake.
He is learning about his world through exploring.
