C6: To be a successful practitioner you need to find ways of linking what you have been taught with what you do. This means turning the theory into practice.
A good starting point to is to observe children and reflect upon what you are seeing in terms of developmental theory. The table below gives some examples of ways in which you might see that theory links to practice. Area of development | How theory links to practice | Physical Development | Compare children’s gross and fine motor skills. You might notice that a child can run easily but finds it hard to draw or cut neatly on a line. | Intellectual development | Look out for signs of egocentrism in children under 7 years; children assume that other people’s world is the same as theirs, for example ‘Is your mummy coming to get you?’ | Communication and language development | Listen out for virtuous errors with nursery and school aged children, for example ‘He has got five sheeps’ or ‘You wented swimming’. Children use grammatical rules they have absorbed but apply them to everything. | Social, emotional and behavioral development | Look out for signs of attachment, for example parents who need to give their children a last kiss before they leave them or who remind them to wave goodbye. Children also show their attachment to their parents by running over to them at the end of the session. You might also hear children talking about what they do at home with their parents. |
Tassoni P 2007 (page 369)
John Bowlby was a psychoanalyst and believed that mental health and behavioral problems could be attributed to early childhood. Bowlby’s evolutionary theory of attachment suggests that children come into the world biologically pre-programmed to form attachments with others, because this will help them to survive.
Abraham Maslow argued that humans have a range of needs. He organised these