Imitation could be that we just stick our tongues out over and over and give lots of repetition and watch for the little attempts that the baby is probably going to do as they are watching us. We can do simple face movements like raising our eyebrows or opening and closing our mouths. Then when the baby starts to imitate us, we can make a big deal about it. Even if the baby doesn’t know our words, they know when we are excited and that they did something that we got excited about! We can imitate facial movements. We can imitate the way that they move their fingers, their legs, their shoulders. We can do something that is easy to imitate, or we can imitate something that they are doing.
B) Cause & effect - trial & error
The idea of cause & effect is that we are an experimenter, testing out different ideas. “If I do this, the baby does that.” Similar is trial and error, where we try different causes and see what happens. Parenting is a process of trial and error, and babies use trial and error to figure out the world. When we imitate the baby, we are teaching them about cause & effect, trial and error, body awareness. They are learning so so may things. When I work with families, I bring in a whole toolbox of ideas and a tips and tricks that we can try, and then we experiment to see which tools work best for each baby and each family.
Another example of cause and effect is, under careful adult supervision, tie a ribbon around their arm or leg that attaches to a toy or a kitchen utensil that is attached to a mobile or a car seat handle or a play gym over their head. Or we can find mittens that have rattles in them. The idea is that the baby learns “when I move my arm or leg, I hear a sound” or “when I move my arm or leg, I see that thing move.”
C) Sound play
The last strategy I’m going to talk about is sound play. We can read rhyming books. California First Five has their whole promotional series about Talk, Read, Sing. And we can pick a sound of the day. I would probably start with vowels. You can sing any song without the words… just using that one vowel.
Make it fun
One of my favorite quotes is that “The critical link between play and learning—the reason we repeat something and therefore learn from it—is pleasure” (Stamm & Spencer’s Bright from the Start). The idea is that when we are having fun, we want to do it again. When we do something over and over, the pathway in our brain gets stronger and we learn by repetition. But it’s the pleasure and the fun that makes us WANT the repetition.
Closing thoughts
With newborns, we are focusing on trust. We are focusing on teaching them that they are lovable and worth responding to. We want them to develop muscles evenly on both sides of the body by giving them intentional time on their tummies when they are awake and supervised. We can use imitation, cause & effect, and sound play to teach babies important skills in a FUN way.
