Little Sponges

You always hear the term children are "little sponges" and if you are a parent you see it more and more everyday with your own kids. I see it with both my boys all the time, especially in language development and comprehension.

I'll give you a couple examples;

1.Stacie speaks to both of my boys in Spanish daily, and Gabriel already knows well over 100 words in Spanish.
2.We read to both and sing songs with our children, so much so that Graeme has picked up on certain words that have helped him compose a sentences that make sense.

Now true I am a proud dad, but there is more to this than just that...Why can children absorb so much at a young age?

The way our brain develops is actually quite amazing. At birth we have all the cells/neurons we will need for our lifetime and as time progresses we will form connections/synapses to other parts of the brain. These connections (aka-learning pathways) are formed partially due to your genetics, but are also based off our experiences. Since every experience is so new to a child they form very rapid connections in the brain, so much so that at 3 years of age the child has twice as many connections as an adult. As the child grows into an adult we end up not using all the new connections we had made, but rather strengthen the ones we do use. The example of pruning a tree is used to help give you a visual. Bonsai! You may have a tree with 10 limbs each of them representing a different content area, but to help 7 of them exceed standards you need to cut back 3 of them. That choice is made in the brain by the shortest/weakest connections that are essentially not being used.



So in conclusion, the more repetitive and beneficial experiences the child has, the more the brain strengthens those connections to avoid having them cropped. Pretty amazing, and to think I got this information from the Department of Education