Infant Toddler Development Training
Module 4, Lesson 2

Activities Supporting Social-Emotional Development

The chart below provides examples of curricular activities for the home, community or group care setting that support social-emotional development.

From: Brain Wonders (Bredekamp & Copple, l987; Frost, Worthington, Reifel, 2005; Gozalez-Mena, Eyer, 2004; Johnson, Christie, &Yawkey, 1999; Johnson-Martin, Jens, Attermeier, & Hacker, 1991; O'Brien, 1997).

Play in Everyday Routines, Activities and Places

Read Characteristics and Consequences of Everyday Natural Learning Opportunities. An overview is provided below, however it is important that the learner access and read the full text of the article.

Article Overview

Relationships between person (i.e., personalities, culture, experiences, training) and environment (i.e., home, child care, enough toys) characteristics of everyday natural learning opportunities effect infant/toddler behavior and performance. To increase infant/toddler's participation, the person and environment (activity setting) variables need to be uniquely situated for infant motivation to explore and interact with materials and other people. Activity settings need to provide for a child's interests (as motivating) and as a source of competence. Activity settings defined in this article are ".situation-specific experience, opportunity, or event that involves a child's interaction with people, the physical environment or both, and provides a context for a child to learn about his or her own abilities and capabilities as well the propensities and proclivities of others. These can be planned, unplanned or incidental" p.70.

Taking an ecological perspective of the importance of the systematic understanding of processes and outcomes of human development (Bronfenbrenner, 1992), researchers studied the effects of variables with intentions of further supporting play and daily living activities between infant/toddlers and their caregivers and hence increasing learning opportunities. The variables included:

• child developmental standing (age, severity and type of disability)
• caregiver responsiveness
• caregiver sensitivity to child behavior
• interactional styles of caregivers
• caregivers contingent responses
• caregiver support and encouragement
• regularity and frequency of the caregiver support
• variety of activity settings
• development-instigating (enticing or impediment) properties of the activity setting (related to individual child interests)
• family SES (age, marital status, income)

Families in this study were visited every other week for 16 weeks for the service provider to coach the families. During the first week of intervention the families and research team implemented two approaches to increase children's participation. For an Activity Schedule and an Activity Setting by Child Behavior Matrix (see pp 74-75 in the article).

Sample

Sample

Researchers used several assessment tools and statistical analysis to determine effects of their interventions. Overall, the findings indicated the strong effects for developmental-instigating characteristics of well designed and child-relevant activity settings with multiple (as needed) opportunities to explore those settings. Infant/toddlers interests, engagement, exploration, and mastery were the best predictors of variations in the outcomes of the everyday learning opportunities (or the activities that were of interest to infants stimulated more positive infant behaviors). The variety of activity settings experienced by the infant/toddlers with their families was found to be positively related to learning opportunities and child functioning (or families choices of activity settings that were motivating for infants provided more learning opportunities and better infant functions). The frequency of the participation in the activity settings was positively associated with child functioning (or the greater times, the infant played in that setting, that familiarity was related to better infant functions).

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