Individual Differences

Because there are great differences in the growth patterns of children, it is difficult for a blog of this type to take into account the broad span of abilities and readiness at all age levels. Some children will be able to progress faster than will be recommended in this blog; others may move along much more slowly. Some children—in fact many children—have intermittent patterns of tediously slow progress followed by great surges of interest and learning.
Accept your child as she is and work with her on whatever level of ability she may have at any particular time in her life. Do not be alarmed if your child is behind the recommended levels of accomplishment contained in this book or other reference materials. Some children will not be ready for a specific activity at the suggested age. In almost all cases, if you are patient and understanding, the slow phases of learning will pass and rewarding learning experiences will unfold later in your child’s life.

The suggested experiences and desired outcomes presented in this book are presented as broad guidelines, and will not fit every child’s developmental pattern. Very few children will reach all of the objectives at the recommended time since the activities presented are designed to stimulate and stretch the mental capacities of children having widely divergent backgrounds and abilities. Do not worry about a child’s slowness to develop a certain skill unless it departs drastically from what is considered normal. In such cases, of course, consult your doctor for further information and resources.

By the time a child is about a year old, you as an attentive parent will have learned a great deal about how to teach your child. You begin to get a sense of her strengths and limitations. You will have learned some tricks about how to hold her attention and how to interpret certain responses to various learning situations. As such a parent, you are striving to make your home a powerful, responsive learning environment for your child where opportunities for physical, metal, and emotional growth abound. You should be as conscious of nurturing your child intellectually and providing him with a balanced learning “diet” as you are to balancing her physical nutrition.