Timeline of Teaching and Learning

How soon can you teach your baby spatial thinking or just anything for that matter?

First and foremost, there are no hard-and-fast rules governing the milestones of learning.

According to common belief, the accepted age is 18-month-old for leaning colors, 24-month-old for leaning shapes, and 36-month-old for learning letters and numbers. But don’t let your mind be preconditioned by any timeline.

Remember, the first three years are most important for the development of your baby’s brain, and anything that your baby is exposed to will be imprinted in his brain as memories, which are the raw materials with which he can build his intelligence later in life. So, a baby’s learning capability boils down to three things: time, effort, and opportunities. Do the parents have the time? Are they willing to put in their effort to teach? Do they create the opportunities of learning for their baby?

Can babies really learn visual spatial thinking at any early age?

Learning is no more than repetition, repetition, and repetition. Keep on repeating the visual as well as the auditory input until it is registered in the baby’s subconscious mind. The timeline is not that important as long as the baby’s sensory organs are sharp and proficient enough to receive the input from the repetition. When and how the baby is going to internalize and understand the information is at the discretion of the baby. It is just like that you can make your baby smart, but you may not be able to make him wise; still, you have to make him smart in the first place.

The story of Helen Keller may illustrate the above. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Keller’s teacher taught her sign language, and she mastered it. But, in the beginning, she had no idea that every sign referred to a particular object; she could not understand the relationship between the signs and the objects until one day when she perceived their subtle relationships—it was total awakening and enlightenment for her. Likewise, you can teach your baby visual spatial intelligence until one day he can understand the concept and then relate it to what he has already learned and mastered.

Make Your Smart Baby Super Smart

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau