Quantity time and child development

Here’s a blog post I wrote back when I was a consultant at Spirit Lake. Enjoy!

I just finished the draft of eight pages on helping your young child with special needs learn language. I also spent a good chunk of the day going through photographs to use to illustrate points on our website. On the one hand, I thought,

“Maybe this is too simple. After all, what are we saying here? Talk to your child. Read to her. Use educational toys. It doesn’t matter if the toys are brand-new or if you made them yourself.”

Is all this really obvious? Perhaps, but other things that are wrong are equally ‘obvious’. At left is a picture of Julia practicing for a report at school. She is in third grade. She is reading from a speech that she typed on the computer. She is wearing a headband she made. She has two blankets for visual aids and in her report she talks about how Pendleton blankets and star quilts are different. She looked this up on the Internet.

On her left is another visual aid, a poster she made with pictures she copied out of books from the library. The cardboard she pasted these on is left over from something and the different colored papers are left over from something else.

My point, and I do have one, is that these skills did not come about overnight or because we did one parent-child…