Your Importance
Importance of Early Development
You are a brain builder!
Early childcare providers play a vital role in laying the foundation for strong brain development.
Today’s children are tomorrow’s neighbors, leaders, and workforce. By making sure Mississippi’s children get off to a strong start, we set the stage for our state to realize new possibilities.
You play a special role as someone who works with young children on a daily basis. By giving them time, attention, and engaging in back and forth, “serve and return” interactions, you can build their brains and support healthy development. We’re here to help. We give you what it takes to make a positive impact in the lives of your infants, toddlers, and preschoolers with tools that help you create brain building moments to helping you talk with parents about your little students’ developmental progress.
Teachers
Early childhood classrooms are full of rapidly growing little minds.
The earliest stages of life have everything to do with later ability to thrive. The architecture of the brain is built from the bottom up, with intense construction going on from infancy through age five.
In the early years, children develop many different types of important skills, laying the foundation for later learning and abilities. The things young children learn to do at certain ages are called developmental milestones. For example, in the first months of life, babies fix and focus their vision and start to move their muscles intentionally, setting them up to explore the world around them. The experiences and environments around young children shape this development.
A short lesson on neurons.
Each day in Mississippi, about 100 new babies are born across the state. These new lives are full of tremendous potential. In the earliest years of life, the brain makes 1 million new neural connections each second. Wow! That’s why this time period is so crucial for lifelong learning. As these connections are established during early childhood, experiences and environmental factors play a huge role in laying the foundation for all future learning, behavior, and health.
It’s amazing how brains develop.
These videos about the architecture of the brain illustrate how they work and why their growth is so crucial in early childhood development. Have fun learning more by playing The Brain Architecture Game, a tabletop game experience that engages players in understanding how early experiences shape brain development.
