Physical Development

•Months 1-3 : The first thing a baby has to learn is to stare, to

look at an object fixedly.

• Months 3-6 : Once the baby holds his head, he starts looking
for the source of sound. The sight of colours is developed and he
starts choosing. He plays with his mouth, moves, kicks and starts
recognizing his parts of the body.

• Months 6-9 :The baby can sit by

himself and starts enjoying the
free use of his hands.
• Months 9-12: The child begins giving
and taking. He learns to take and drop
objects.

•Year 1-2 : Kids go through a transition from babies to toddlers

during the second year of life, as tentative first steps give way to
confident walking. At 12 months, most say their first word and
start to use hand gestures and point to things. They can take
objects to different places as indicated.

• Year 2-3 :Hand-eye coordination and manual dexterity will

improve. Toddlers gain better control over fingers and hands and
can explore toys and surroundings more than before.
 Stages of Speech Development
• Crying
The baby expresses his sensations of pleasure or displeasure in
variations of crying and by making crowing sounds that the mother
gradually learns to understand during the first months.
• Cooing
The first recognizable sounds, with velar consonants such as /k/ and
/g/ and vowels such as /i/ and /u/, are present by the time the child
is three months old.
•Babbling
By six months, the child bursts out in strings of consonant- vowel
syllable clusters, almost as a kind of vocalic play.
Through the tenth and eleventh month, they are capable of using
their vocalization to express emotions and emphasis. This stage is
characterized by attempted imitations.
• One- word stage
Between twelve and eighteen months, children begin to produce a variety of
recognizable single unit utterances.

• Two- word stage

It can begin around eighteen to twenty months, as the child’s vocabulary
moves beyond fifty distinct words. By the time the child is two years old, a
variety of combinations such as baby chair and mommy eat will have appeared.

•Telegraphic speech
Strings of lexical morphemes in a phrase: Cat drink milk
The child has developed some sentence building capacity and can order the
forms correctly.

•Multiple-word utterances
By the age of two and a half, the child will begin producing a large number
of utterances. The child’s vocabulary will expand rapidly and its
pronunciation will become closer to the form of the adult language.
Why teaching English to babies?
 Phonological Reason
Newly-born babies seem to recognize the phonological subtleties of any
natural language the environment offers them. At birth, babies can be called
“WORLD CITIZENS”.

At three months of age babies’ babbling is identical no matter where they live.
Even deaf-born babies babble just like any hearing baby. Nature prepares them
to learn any language, and babbling is the exercise that will help them do so.

However, at six months, their babbling has already got an accent. Research
points out that at 8 months old any healthy baby can imitate the sounds of the
languages he has consistently been exposed to.

At 12 months, he has already lost this capacity. The baby has become a
“LANGUAGE SPECIFIC LISTENER”. This means that he is only
interested in the language that his community uses and somehow becomes
“deaf ” to the quality of certain foreign sounds; therefore he has missed the
unique opportunity to sound like a native speaker of a second or a third
language.
 Grammatical Reason
Neurobiological studies have suggested that learning the structures of a
second language might be subject to similar time constraints to those that are
imposed by nature to the acquisition of the grammar of the native language.

At babyhood, the human brain is endowed with WINDOWS OF

OPPORTUNITIES that allow for neurological connections that
facilitate the internalization of grammatical systems. In other words, the
grammatical map is built in the brain mostly during the first three years of
life. It is finished at four and a half or five years of age.

There is lots of evidence that after this early age the internalization of the
grammar of a foreign language requires some cognitive effort that gradually
increases year after year. Therefore, natural and effortless foreign language
learning seems to take place if started at babyhood.
The early stimulator factor
• The human brain grows through use and it completes its
growth extremely early in life. Since language is such a
complicated function, the demands on the infant to learn a
second language will develop his brain at its most.
Methods
 Games
• Peek-a-boo
• Playing with balloons
• Dice games
• Puzzles
• Sorting game
• Mirror, mirror
• Hide it
• Musical objects
 Stories
• Encourage imagination and creativity
• Sharpen memory
• Enhance verbal proficiency
• Improve listening skills
• Make them aware of their own culture
• Instill virtues
Songs and Rhymes

• They support the early stages of language

development.
• They help babies experience patterns.
• Music and movement provide opportunities
for fine- and gross-motor skills
development.
• They help babies gain active listening skills.