This fascinates me as I watch my daughter A (13 months old) learn various things, like how to communicate, how to do things for herself like eat / brush her teeth / comb her hair and so many other things. She does not speak yet, but she is learning to communicate her needs through some actions and of course a lot of yelling.  But why does she yell so much? The reason she yells is because at the moment, it is her easiest way to communicate. We have been trying to teach her various other methods as she does not speak yet, such as baby sign language and pointing. She has started pointing at things when requested, such as car, plane, fan, baby. Over the last few days, she has started making sounds like “ka”, “pa” and “fa” which we can only assume she means car, plane and fan.

Thinking back to my days of research, my framework relied heavily on Bloom’s Taxonomy, which I chose to use over SOLO and a few other options I had. I have spent many months questioning my choices nonetheless always returning to the simplicity of Bloom’s Taxonomy which seemed to apply to so many real-life situations as well. I can’t help revisiting Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognition as I see A’s cognition grow leaps and bounds. To recap for those who need it, Bloom’s levels of cognition are Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create. At first, A did not know anything about the car. (I imagine, as her dad and I kept pointing at our car exclaiming “car! car!” she must have been thinking “these people are nutso!”) However, slowly, she started associating the “car” with our car parked outside home. She remembered what we told her and she now pointed outside our home when we said “car”.  Slowly, she understood what she was pointing at, what we were telling her and would point outside the house promptly. After awhile she learnt to apply the concept of pointing to a car in a different way – she would point at other cars when she was at the park! She has now learnt to identify a car.

I find that this strategy has been working to teach her about many different objects and with many different processes she needs to apply in her daily life. She has even learnt to brush her teeth in this way!

The human mind is amazing, and it is so wonderful to watch a tiny mind grow!