Child Psych Book Project Resources

Use the following sites to help you create your children's book based on a two-year-old's physical, cognitive, and psychosocial development.

Starter Library for Two to Three-Year-Olds

Child Development Tracker: Your Two-Year Old

Oprah's Reading List: 0-2 Years

Parenting and Child Health: 2-3 Years

Ages and Stages: Two-Year- Olds

Child Psych Book Project

Creating a Story Book

Objective: You will create an 18-20 page storybook that is appropriate for the physical, cognitive, and social/emotional development of most two year olds. You may work by yourself or with one other person.

Value:             55 points

Due date:       Monday March 11^th

Your book must:

a. have a cover with an illustration and title central to your story. (5 points)

b. contain 18-20 pages. (5 points)

c. have an illustration on each page. (5 points)

d. have no more than two sentences on each page. (5 points)

e. demonstrate evidence of creativity and hard work. (5 points)

f. be neat and attractive. (5 points)

g. be turned in with a two to three paragraph (typed) description of how your book is appropriate for the physical, cognitive, and social/emotional development of most two year olds. (10 points)

A. Physical (5 points)

Required: The colors used should be bright and engaging. The book size should be such that a two year old can easily hold it.

Optional: You may wish to include different textures, shapes, or letters that the child could touch. Consider thick pages to make it easier to turn from page to page. If you are artistically inclined, you might attempt some pop-ups in the book. You might consider including parts in the book that invite the two year old to clap, jump, or make noises. (Anything you include should fit the story.)

B. Cognitive (5 points)

Required: The story should be simple and include some repetition.

Optional: You may wish to use rhythm, alliteration, refrains, onomatopoeia, and/or rhyme. There might be one page where the child has to draw or color some object. (This would also fit the physical domain.) The book might teach the difference between today, yesterday, and tomorrow or reinforce simple math: one, two, and three. The book might ask the two year old to point to objects in the room or identify her eyes, mouth, ears, etc. (Anything you include should fit the story.)

C. Social/Emotional (5 points)

Optional: Consider a story that teaches specific appropriate behaviors: saying please and thank you, picking up toys, being nice to a sibling, using an indoor or outdoor voice. The story might address common two year old fears/concerns: sleeping in the dark, being away from mom/dad, wanting to always get something first. The story might include a simple song for the parent and child to sing together. You might include a lot of (appropriate) humor so the child and parent can laugh together. The story might also encourage hugs/kisses between the child and parent.

Child Psych- Language Objectives #2

646- Child Psychology

Language Unit Objectives pgs. 194-199; 270-274

Ch. 7 pgs 194-199

1.     Explain aspects of Noam Chomsky’s nativism approach to language development. Include the role of the LAD. Criticisms?

2.     Explain aspects of B.F Skinner’s social learning theory. Criticisms.

3.     Explain the role of the brain’s hemispheres regarding language development.

4.     (Skip “Social Interactions” and “Prelinguistic Period” sections on pg 196)

5.     (Skip “Vocab development” on pg 197)

6.     Define child-directed speech.  How is it both helpful and “hurtful”?

7.     Identify several benefits of reading aloud to children.

Ch. 10 pgs 270-274

8.     Identify the vocab development of a 3 and 6 year old.

9.     Define fast mapping

10. Explain the grammar and syntax of a 3 year old.

11. Explain the grammar and syntax of a 4-5 year old.

12. Explain the grammar and syntax of a 5-7 year old.

13. Define pragmatics.

14. Define social speech.

15. What is private speech?

16. Explain both Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s viewpoints about private speech. Read box 10-2 on pg 272.

17. What percent of preschool children show language delays? Which gender is more likely to show delays?

18. What is the prognosis/ outcome for children with delayed language development?

19. Define emergent literacy.

20. What are several contributing factors to literacy?

21. (Skip pg 274)

Child Psych- Language Unit Objectives

Ch. 7 Pages 189-194 (top)

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1.     Define language.

2.     Explain Charles Darwin’s contributions to the study of language development.

3.     Define prelinguistic speech.

4.     Explain the progression of prelinguistic speech: crying, cooing, babbling. Include ages.

5.     Define phoneme

6.     When can infants perceive sounds in all languages? In their native language?

7.     When do babies lose their sensitivity to sounds that are not part of their native language?

9.     Explain the sequence of gestures used by babies. Distinguish between conventional social, representational, and symbolic gestures.

10. How are gestures linked to vocabulary development and multi-word sentences?

11. Define linguistic speech. When does it begin?

12. Define holophrase.

13. What is the difference between passive and active (spoken) vocabulary?

14. What part of speech is an English-speaking child's first word?

15. Define telegraphic speech. When does it occur?

16. When does a naming explosion take place? What is it?

17. Define syntax. When are children more competent of sentence structure?

18.  Define underextension. Provide an example.

19. Define overextension. Provide an example.

20. Define overregularization. Provide an example.

Seniors- Ch. 7 The Social-Contextual Approach

 
Read the following review about Annette Lareau's study on the impact of socioeconomic status on a child's development.  On a separate word document, answer the questions below.

1. How does the information in the reading relate to the social-contextual approach to cognitive development. Be specific.

2. Summarize the information with which you agree and disagree.  Cite specific examples. Defend your answers. 

Due- Friday, Feb 8th

Value- 10 points 

Length- At least 1 pg typed, double spaced, font 12, MLA heading, 1 inch margins

David Brooks on Annette Lareau’s “Unequal Childhoods”

For the past two decades, Annette Lareau has embedded herself in American families. She and her researchers have sat on living room floors as families went about their business, ridden in back seats as families drove hither and yon. 

Lareau's work is well known among sociologists, but neglected by the popular media. And that's a shame because through her close observations and careful writings — in books like "Unequal Childhoods" — Lareau has been able to capture the texture of inequality in America. She's described how radically child-rearing techniques in upper-middle-class homes differ from those in working-class and poor homes, and what this means for the prospects of the kids inside. 

The thing you learn from her work is that it's wrong to say good parents raise successful kids and bad parents raise unsuccessful ones. The story is more complicated than that.
Looking at upper-middle-class homes, Lareau describes a parenting style that many of us ridicule but do not renounce. This involves enrolling kids in large numbers of adult-supervised activities and driving them from place to place. Parents are deeply involved in all aspects of their children's lives. They make concerted efforts to provide learning experiences.

Home life involves a lot of talk and verbal jousting. Parents tend to reason with their children, not give them orders. They present "choices" and then subtly influence the decisions their kids make. Kids feel free to pass judgment on adults, express themselves and even tell their siblings they hate them when they're angry.

The pace is exhausting. Fights about homework can be titanic. But children raised in this way know how to navigate the world of organized institutions. They know how to talk casually with adults, how to use words to shape how people view them, how to perform before audiences and look people in the eye to make a good first impression.

Working-class child-rearing is different, Lareau writes. In these homes, there tends to be a much starker boundary between the adult world and the children's world. Parents think that the cares of adulthood will come soon enough and that children should be left alone to organize their own playtime. When a girl asks her mother to help her build a dollhouse out of boxes, the mother says no, "casually and without guilt," because playtime is deemed to be inconsequential — a child's sphere, not an adult's.

Lareau says working-class children seem more relaxed and vibrant, and have more intimate contact with their extended families. "Whining, which was pervasive in middle-class homes, was rare in working-class and poor ones," she writes.

But these children were not as well prepared for the world of organizations and adulthood. There was much less talk in the working-class homes. Parents were more likely to issue brusque orders, not give explanations. Children, like their parents, were easily intimidated by and pushed around by verbally dexterous teachers and doctors. Middle-class kids felt entitled to individual treatment when entering the wider world, but working-class kids felt constrained and tongue-tied.

The children Lareau describes in her book were playful 10-year-olds. Now they're in their early 20's, and their destinies are as you'd have predicted. The perhaps overprogrammed middle-class kids got into good colleges and are heading for careers as doctors and other professionals. The working-class kids are not doing well. The little girl who built dollhouses had a severe drug problem from ages 12 to 17. She had a child outside wedlock, a baby she gave away because she was afraid she would hurt the child. She now cleans houses with her mother. 

Lareau told me that when she was doing the book, the working-class kids seemed younger; they got more excited by things like going out for pizza. Now the working-class kids seem older; they've seen and suffered more.

But the point is that the working-class parents were not bad parents. In a perhaps more old-fashioned manner, they were attentive. They taught right from wrong. In some ways they raised their kids in a healthier atmosphere. (When presented with the schedules of the more affluent families, they thought such a life would just make kids sad.)