Fostering the Five Domains of Human Development and a Freebie!

Teaching is a performance skill. Like a dancer who practices muscle movements daily until his body can perform intricate dance routines with ease, an actor who studies unconscious body movements until she can recreate them on the stage, or a writer who knows all of the elements of a well written tale so well that she can construct a page turning novel, teachers learn and practice the elements of lesson design, behavior management and modification, and lesson delivery, until these become second nature.

While studying Early Childhood Education as an undergraduate, I received tutelage from great instructors who were true early childhood theorists, Dr. Barbara Taylor and Dr. Sally Pena. Both of these women taught me the importance of including the five domains of early childhood development into every lesson plan. I remember the time I spent writing exhaustingly detailed lesson plans made specifically to include all five domains. The time turned out to be invaluable practice for my performance art, however, as now it is ingrained in me to be mindful of these important aspects of the learning of young children. Although I don’t write these mega-detailed lesson plans anymore, those domains of development are always fore-most in my mind when planning my kindergarten day.  

So what are those important areas of development?

1. Gross Motor Development: Are the young children in our care using their large muscles daily? We must give students the opportunities to crawl, walk, run, skip, climb, and climb.
2. Fine Motor Development: Do we give children opportunity to develop hand-eye coordination? The opportunity to control precisely the small muscles in their hands? We must give students the opportunities to color, write, use tweezers, tear paper, glue beans, build with small objects.
3. Language Development: Are our students hearing stories with rich vocabulary, participating in vocabulary rich dialogues, participating in enriching phonemic awareness activities, and strategically practicing phonics skills? We must give our students a rich auditory and oral environment and be keyed in to their needs in vocabulary.
4. Cognitive Development: Do we challenge our students with cause and effect, reasoning and problem solving skills? We must make sure that our teaching affords opportunities for neurological development and that we are helping to wire and in some cases, rewire, their young minds.
5. Social/Emotional Development: Are we giving our students opportunity to be social? Do we have adequate opportunity for play-rich experiences? Do we foster a classroom environment of caring? Do we explicitly teach important life-skills? We can never underestimate the importance of social development to a young child. 

As I learned from Taylor and Pena, crafting lessons that include all of these domains takes practice, but after time, it becomes second nature. And, sometimes, you just might find a kind blogger who gives one away for free! Like this game, "Day Traders" that includes all five of the domains: Gross Motor (walking), Fine Motor (writing words), Language (Oral Language and Sight Words), Cognitive (Problem Solving) and Social/Emotional (Play Based).