Author: Natasha Boskic

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1.2 What is EI: concerns/special considerations for Aboriginal people

People of Aboriginal Descent

Early Intervention Programs in Aboriginal/First Nations Communities

As with all families with children with disabilities there are as many differences as there are similarities within Aboriginal families. Each family’s experience is unique to them and to their child.

However, there are common themes experienced by all families of children with disabilities. These themes cross cultural, social, economic and educational backgrounds. Families want the best for their children. A diagnosis of disability can represent uncertainty or possible threat to their child’s future. Also, many families struggle in learning more about the disability, what the disability means for their child, for their family and for their capacity as a family to adapt and to manage.

Beyond the challenges common to all families, Aboriginal families also face other stress factors which may impact their capacity to adapt to and manage disability related challenges. These include limited services in Aboriginal communities and limited access to services for urban Aboriginal families. Available services may not be culturally relevant or linked to services already used by the family. Small communities may have little or no experience with rarer conditions and may have few or no resources available to support the child and family when a diagnosis of disability is made.

In terms of early intervention services that follow culturally sensitive practices for families with Aboriginal or First Nations descent, the Aboriginal Infant Development Program and the more recently created Aboriginal Supported Child Development Program are designed to support Aboriginal families with children at risk, or with delay or disability. These programs work to help Aboriginal families  access and use available assessment and intervention services.  As family-centered services, these programs follow the family lead in determining the family strengths and needs and work to provide the family with a range of individualized services that promote healthy child and family development.

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Interact

This picture illustrates how adults and children interact during a meal
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1.3 Cognitive Development: Development in Early Elementary

Early Elementary Years

Cognitive Development: Early Elementary Years1

The development of cognitive and thinking skills follows a predictable order. As children develop their cognitive skills during the early years, they get a set of tools that will allow them to cope with (and also function within) the later demands of their school years.

This discovery will continue throughout their preschool, middle and high-school years as they experiment with different activities and situations. Young children who are given room to play and to try out different toys and tools will be more likely develop the skills needed to learn to read, write, do math and try out different life-skills situations as they grow from children to adults.

Key Point: Recent studies report that children who have little or no opportunities to play may fail to develop their cognitive, language and social skills to their full potential. They may also lag behind their peers in these areas.
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1.3 Cognitive Development: Pre-academic

Pre-academic Skills

Cognitive Development: Pre-academic Skills1

Pre-academic skills are part of cognitive development. Young children who develop these skills have better chances of succeeding later on at school, and carry the skills with them as they grow older.

Pre-academic skills include:

  • being interested in books
  • enjoying being read to
  • understanding that letters and numbers are symbols that mean something
  • being able to retell basic parts of a story
  • recognizing certain logos (e.g. McDonald’s golden arches)
  • being able to engage in simple and complex phoneme awareness (see full Glossary) exercises
  • identifying letters of the alphabet
  • matching forms and letters
  • demonstrating an understanding of one to one correspondence (see full Glossary)
  • scribbling
  • imitating vertical and horizontal strokes (Fig. 1)
  • completing simple and complex sequences.
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1.3 Cognitive Development: Thinking Skills

Thinking or Evaluation Skills

Cognitive Development: Thinking or Evaluation Skills1

Cognitive skills allow a child to function well in school and society. These skills refer to a child’s ability to receive, process and organize information in a way that allows him or her to use the information properly, both in the present time and later on. They include simple and complex skills.

LESS COMPLEX SKILLS INCLUDE:

 

COMPLEX SKILLS INCLUDE:

  • paying attention to and concentrating on a task or activity
  • easily changing from one task to another
  • recognizing and understanding when a situation is unsafe
  • pointing out that something is silly
  • identifying missing parts of objects
  • engaging in divergent and creative thinking, or thinking “outside the box”
  • answering “why do we” questions
  • adjusting to changes in the environment and modifying (see full Glossary) one’s plans, accordingly
  • remembering directions and instructions
  • generalizing (see full Glossary) what one has learned from one situation to the next
  • being able to give simple directions
  • being able to describe a certain goal viewing a situation from more than one perspective
  • understanding that there are consequences to one’s actions.

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1.3 What is Development: Cognitive Development

Cognitive Development: A Brief Overview

Cognitive development1 involves the child’s ability to grow and develop their thinking or evaluation skills, and adapt to changes. It begins with the infant developing “object permanence object permanence  (see full Glossary) and realizing action and reaction, or “cause and effect”. During the preschool years, it may involve simple abilities, like recognizing colors, or complex abilities, like concentrating on a task. Other cognitive abilities include the following:

  • adapting to changes in one’s environment
  • engaging in activities that require thinking “outside the box” or divergent thinking (see full Glossary)
  • being creative
  • learning new skills and apply them to other (old or new) situations
  • pre-academic skills needed for the child to engage in directed or school-based learning activities. These require self-regulation; (see full Glossary) for example, sitting quietly for certain periods of time, listening to and following instructions, sorting and categorizing items (like shapes or colours) and completing paper and pencil tasks, like drawing or writing.

Developing cognitive skills takes time, and takes both experience and practice. Some more complex cognitive skills, like completing multiplication with decimals, are only possible if equally important “simpler” skills develop first, like counting and sequencing. The development of cognitive skills follows an order that is quite predictable for almost all children. Although most children follow the same order, each child acquires these skills at slightly different rates than other children. People working in the study of child development refer to these as individual differences (see full Glossary). They are related to every child’s unique physical and temperamental characteristics, and to the environment and culture where they grow and develop.

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1.3 Communication: Development in Early Elementary

How Development in the Early Childhood Years Affects Development in the Elementary School

Communication Development: How Development in the Early Childhood Years Affects Development in the Elementary School1

Children will need to use oral language and make themselves understood by others by the time they start elementary school. They will need language in order to communicate their needs and wants with others―both peers and adults. They also need to understand what others want or expect from them. This also refers to non-verbal language, like understanding gestures. These are known as  non-verbal communication cues because communication happens without any words. Developing these skills will help children to be effective communicators, and will give them the tools to learn how to read and write. It’s important to note that language skills are needed for all areas of the elementary curriculum, not just reading and writing.

Children need language skills that are well-developed so that they can learn the subjects taught at school, for example, math, science, language arts, home economics and even physical education. This is because children will need to follow the directions of their teachers in all areas of the curriculum. The need to develop language and communication skills extends beyond the early childhood years. In fact, as children grow older, the communication and language demands that are placed on them will be higher. A solid language and communication foundation in the early years will provide children with the tools they need to understand and be understood by others.

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1.3 Communication: Pragmatics

Pragmatic Language

Communication Development: Pragmatic Language1

Pragmatic language is the social reason we use language, or the “practical’ aspect of language. We use language to communicate our thoughts and ideas to those around us. We also use language to explain and wonder about things, and try to make sense of the world around us.

Some pragmatic milestones include the following:

  • making eye contact with others (unless not culturally appropriate)
  • learning to take turns
  • using a tone of voice that mirrors that of adults (e.g. using different intonation when telling something, when asking a question, when excited , upset or scared)
  • modulating intensity of voice as needed (e.g. inside vs. outside voice)
  • using language to label things (e.g. it’s a dog)
  • using language to protest something (e.g. it’s not fair)
  • using language to express emotions (e.g. I feel happy/sad)
  • using language to express opinions (e.g. well, I don’t like it one bit!)
  • answering questions (e.g., it wasn’t me…)
  • telling others about experiences, briefly at first, then in detail (e.g., I saw that movie; I went to the movies with my older brother and his girlfriend)
  • staying on topic in a conversation (e.g., brings examples or ideas on the same topic)
  • moving to a different topic in a conversation (e.g., understands that topic of conversation has changed)
1 see References
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1.3 Communication: Articulation

Articulation

Communication Development: Articulation1

Articulation refers to how a child pronounces the different sounds when they speak their language. Children develop the ability to pronounce certain sounds before others, simply because some sounds are more difficult to pronounce than others.

Babies’ first sounds are usually vowel sounds. This is called “cooing.” A baby will say, for example, aaaaa, uuuuuuuuuuu….

After that, comes the production of simple consonant sounds. Most children by the time they are 18 to 24 months old, can produce the following consonant sounds: p (papa), b (baba), d (dada), and the m (mama) and n (nana) sounds. After that, come the k (kaka), g (gaga, gugu), t (tata). The “r”, “l” and “s” sounds are a bit more difficult to pronounce and some children do not master the production of these consonant sounds until they are five or six years old.

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1.3 Communication: Expressive Language

Expressive Language

Communication Development: Expressive Language1

Expressive language is what we use in order to get our message across to someone. This can be done verbally (e.g. by saying something) or non-verbally (e.g. by waving bye-bye to someone). Children develop their expressive language gradually and sequentially. In order to become experts in the expressive language domain, children will have to develop and master the following non-verbal, verbal and written language skills:

Nonverbal expressive language includes:

  • crying
  • smiling
  • laughing
  • frowning
  • waving bye-bye
  • pointing
  • throwing something (like a toy on the floor, in protest)

Verbal expressive language includes:

  • cooing (i.e. saying vowel sounds, over and over again: e.g., aaaaaaaaaaaa, uuuuuuuuuuuuu, eeeeeeeeee…)
  • producing guttural sounds when happy and content
  • babbling (i.e. saying consonant/vowel sound combinations, over and over again: e. g. bababa, dadada, badaga…)
  • imitating sounds and facial expressions
  • saying “mama” and “dada”, when referring to primary caregivers
  • repeating what others are saying
  • saying one word phrases (or “holophrases”): for example, “up” could mean “pick me up, please” or “see birdie up there”
  • labeling objects, animals, or people (e.g., “car,” “ouwee,” “cat,” “baby”, while pointing at these
  • saying please and thank-you
  • asking questions
  • answering questions
  • putting two words together (e.g. Mommy go, Daddy shoe)
  • using negatives (e.g. “no”)
  • using qualitative concepts (e.g. big/small, short/tall…)
  • using quantitative concepts (e.g. a lot, a little, all, none…)
  • using the present progressive (e.g. he is walking)
  • using pronouns (e.g. I, you)
  • using possessives (e.g. my, mine)
  • using prepositions (e.g. in, on, under, over)
  • using the regular and irregular past tense (e.g. walked, gave)
  • using the future tense (e.g. will walk, is going to walk)
  • putting three and four words together (e.g. I want milk, daddy go here)
  • putting more than four words together in a full sentence (i.e., I can read this book)
1. see References

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