Children's Minds

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If you're supporting a friend or partner who is struggling with their feelings or mental health, this information is for you. Shonkoff, J.P. et al (2018) Understanding motivation: building the brain architecture that supports learning, health, and community participation: working paper 14 (PDF). Cambridge: Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University. Childline The air traffic control system in a child’s brain is also known as ‘executive function’: the system that manages social and cognitive skills. Children depend on these emerging executive function skills as they learn to read and write, develop arithmetic skills and interact with peers (Shonkoff et al, 2011). Take time to understand a parent or carer’s position. Sometimes services designed to help might be overwhelming for already overloaded parents. For further reading about child brain development, search the NSPCC library catalogue using the keyword "brain" and "child development".

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Constructing with a variety of materials develops the children’s fine motor skills, including muscular strength and hand-eye-coordination. Superhero play provides children with an emotional outlet as well as opportunities for playing in a group. To further develop communication and language skills children can share their ideas, direct each other, describe their models and tell their own superhero stories. Scribing the children’s superhero stories supports their future writing skills. The children may want to illustrate these. You can provide story books as suggested, to support the children’s literacy learning. The construction process, whether on a small or large scale, develops children’s use of technological and scientific language (understanding the world). Children can consider which materials work best and why. Other activities By using this service, you agree that you will only keep content for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services This Sharing the Brain Story metaphor compares how children manage mental processes to how an air traffic controller manages aeroplanes in an airport. Donalson comes down squarely in the revisionist camp, with strong arguments that some Piagetian tasks are faulty as evidence as to what is possible with young children because of Piaget's own adult presumptions. The argument put forth by her and others like Jerome Bruner is that we must direct our attention not just to what children can learn but how and why they learn and understand. Help children foster decision making and cognitive skills within playful situations appropriate to their age and ability: encourage the child to make choices and ‘direct their own activities with decreasing adult supervision over time’ (Shonkoff et al, 2011, p.6).Sign up for our face-to-face training programme delivered by experts where we explore child brain development and the six metaphors through practical exercises, case studies, examples and more. Help ‘buffer’ the effects of tolerable stresses by offering safe, reliable and responsive support to children and young people. By sharing the brain story through these six metaphors, all the adults around a child can learn how to help create positive brain building environments and experiences. These include: positively reinforce children’s vocalisations: children repeat behaviours when they are praised, which helps shape their babbles into words (Crowley, 2017).

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Shonkoff, J.P. et al (2011) Building the brain’s “air traffic control” system: how early experiences shape the development of executive function: working paper 11 (PDF). Cambridge: Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University. Every day, we manage various demands on our attention, from paying attention and controlling impulses, to managing emotions and prioritising tasks (Shonkoff et al, 2011). Find out more about the adolescent brain in our How safe are our children? report for 2020 How we use metaphors to explain brain developmentShonkoff, J.P. et al (2014), Excessive stress disrupts the architecture of the developing brain: working paper 3 (PDF). Cambridge: Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University. As good quality materials help build a strong house, positive experiences during childhood help build healthy brains.

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Over time, if the positive experiences outweigh negative ones, the scales tip towards more positive long-term outcomes for the child. We want to help all children’s scales tip towards the positive.Register for our face-to-face training to better understand how to foster healthy brain development in children Stimulate children by using different materials for exploration. Give them plenty of multi-sensory experiences and the opportunity to see images of art works. Eventually children will offer their own thoughts about their experiences. ‘This feels like a cuddle’ (a 3 year old exploring a strip of velvet). As children develop in imagination and creativity they are able to tell a story, relate to other people, keep themselves emotionally grounded and enter their imaginary worlds. Video