Can an early learning program help your infant to develop new skills? Your baby isn’t ready to read or write, but this doesn’t mean they can’t start school. If you’re searching for a program that can help your young child to grow as a person and build foundational developmental skills, take a look at what you need to know about infant learning, educational options, and Montessori schools.

Why Are Early Learning Experiences Important for Infants?

Your infant is years away from sitting at a desk and learning about calculus, microbiology, and philosophy. Even though they have well over a decade until these types of high school and college-level courses come into play, your baby is often still ready to learn. Not only are they ready to learn, they’re ready to learn right now.

Early learning experiences (at home and in a formal educational environment) can help your child to build independence and change the architecture of their brain. More than one million neural connections form each second in your child’s first years, according to the Harvard University Center on the Developing Child. This is followed by a reduction of the excess or unnecessary connections – known as pruning.

The building and pruning processes shape your child’s brain and create an early foundation for future learning and development. Given the intensity of neural (or brain) changes in your child’s first few years of life, an educational or developmental environment can help your child to build cognitive skills such as mental reasoning, memory, and critical thinking skills as well as emotional, social, and physical abilities.

How Do Infants Learn?

As an adult, you read, discuss, watch, and engage in a variety of personally meaningful experiences to develop new skills and gain new knowledge. While a lecture or a film may provoke thoughts or help you to master complex concepts, your infant isn’t ready to learn in the same way as you.

Instead of an adult-like type of learning, infants often learn through their senses. They experience the world through sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. This gives them a hands-on or first-person way to explore everything in their environment, take in new information, process the information, and build skills.

Which Early Education Experiences Can Help An Infant To Learn?

There isn’t one experience that can help a baby to learn. Instead, different children learn through different methods. Some prefer solo exploration, while others enjoy interacting with adults or older children.

If you want the perfect match between your child’s temperament or learning style and an early education environment, you may need to explore a few options. Some pre-ks, daycares, and similar programs offer a curriculum-based approach that leads the child and controls the learning process. Other programs provide a more child-centered approach that promotes independent exploration and sensory discoveries.

As a naturally curious person, your infant has the desire or need to explore. This means a child-centered or child-led type of learning environment, such as Montessori schools, may help them to develop and grow at their own pace.

What Is a Montessori Infant Classroom?

The Montessori infant classroom is a space that respects your child’s individuality and encourages independence-building through exploration in a safe, caring, and nurturing way. While each Montessori school may vary slightly, the guiding principles of Dr. Maria Montessori’s educational philosophy ground all infant (and other age) classrooms.

Your child will guide their own learning experience with careful supervision and build skills such as self-care, gross motor (the large muscle groups needed to crawl and walk), fine motor (the smaller muscle groups needed to hold objects or write), language, cognitive, social, and emotional abilities.

Along with specific skills, your child will become part of a caring community in the Montessori classroom. This can reinforce social and emotional development and create a foundation for other similar abilities as they grow.

Are you ready to explore the Montessori infant room? Contact Miniapple International Montessori School for more information.