As a new parent of a baby with Down Syndrome, I would often wonder what really am I expected to do. I wanted to help my child to develop to the best of her potential, I believed that she could do better than what they said she could but I wasn't sure how I was going to get started.
My first attempts were instinctive and then over time I built on ideas that I found in books and on the internet. But recently I found some great ideas for early learning for kids with Down Syndrome on Early Support, a document produced by UK's Department for Education and Skills. The information presented here is just what a new parent or a parent of a young child with Down Syndrome needs. Here are some excerpts from this document along with a few videos that I thought make some great points quite beautifully.
Helping your child develop and learn
All children learn a lot in the early years of life and every child learns at his or her own pace. At times, your child may appear to lose skills that you know they have already learnt or slow down in one area of development while pushing ahead in another. There may be unexpected spurts of development. This uneven pattern of development is characteristic of children with Down syndrome.
This section considers development under the following headings:
● Learning to interact with others
● Learning to move and explore
● Learning through play
● Learning to communicate
● Developing attention and memory skills
● Learning how to think and learn
Learning to interact with others
In the first year of life, your baby’s social development is likely to progress relatively well. He or she will probably smile, coo, babble and respond to you. Most infants with Down syndrome are only slightly delayed in their social development and early communication skills, and are usually sensitive to emotional cues.
This is a strength, because the ability to make good relationships with other people has a direct effect on happiness, friendship and inclusion later on.
What you can do
● Enjoy cuddles and social games with your baby as you encourage eye contact, smiling and cooing in the early months of life. Your baby is beginning to learn to communicate through these games.
● Include your child in family activities and create as many opportunities for them to play with other children as possible. Children learn social skills all day, everyday, by being with their family and with other adults
and children.
● Try not to ‘baby’ your child, but encourage age-appropriate behaviour. Over time, this will build self-confidence and prepare your child for life with other children of a similar age.
● Encourage your child to play with other children in a mainstream nursery or playgroup, if you can. Children with Down syndrome are particularly good at learning by watching and imitating others and this makes it easier to learn from other children of the same age and about how to get on with other people.
Learning to move and explore
Reach, grasping and holding (often known as fine motor skills) are important for all babies. These skills allow young children to explore toys and objects in their world, and to develop self-help skills such as feeding
and dressing.
Movement skills like sitting, rolling, crawling and walking are known as gross motor skills. They help babies and children to start exploring on their own. Your child is likely to face significant delay in developing motor skills, which makes it harder to explore and move around. The best way to encourage your child is through play and by motivating them to move, explore, and copy other people.
Who can help?
A physiotherapist or an occupational therapist can offer advice and pass on good ideas. Not all children with Down syndrome need professional help, but they should all be offered a pediatric physiotherapy
assessment in the first three months of life and an occupational therapy assessment at a later stage. If you feel that your baby is making progress and you are giving them lots of play and stimulation you probably don’t need much input from a therapist. However, if you feel your baby is not progressing, ask for help.
For example:
● If your baby is hypotonic (floppy) with poor head control in the early months, ask for ideas on how to handle them and how to improve head control.
● If your baby needs help to play comfortably on his or her tummy, ask for some tips. It sometimes helps to provide more support by putting a rolled towel under the armpits, which lifts the upper trunk. Don’t leave
your baby on their own while they’re lying on their front until you’re sure they can get out of this position safely and without help. Playing on the tummy can help your baby develop a strong neck and back,
and help towards sitting and crawling.
What you can do
● Give your baby the chance to play in different positions during the day and help them to feel and explore toys that they are not yet able to pick up.
● Sing action songs with your child to help them learn about body parts and to encourage them to practice movement.
● As your baby grows into a toddler and young child, use music, movement and sports activities to practice and develop skills. Music, dance and yoga all provide opportunities for children to have fun at the same time as learning to control movement. You might go along to local toddler activity groups, music classes, baby swimming classes, preschool ballet classes, ball pits and soft play areas.
Learning through play
Play is the first, and perhaps the most important way, to help your child learn. All children learn through play and exploration. Children with Down syndrome learn in the same way as other children but often benefit
from more support for their play
What you can do
● Become your baby’s ‘play partner’ and show your child how to play with their toys. Show them what a toy does, how to get it to make a noise or to move, how to screw or unscrew it, how to hide and
find a toy. By demonstrating to your child how to do more interesting things with toys, you can prevent your child getting stuck on repetitive patterns of play.
● Take turns with your baby as a means to demonstrate how to do something. Sometimes it’s helpful to have two toys, so that you can both shake a rattle or bounce a ball.
● Later on, join in with imaginative play to show your child what to do. Imaginative games provide valuable opportunities to teach new language to children. Help your child to link two or three words together as you say ‘Can you wash dolly’s face?’ or ‘Watch me put dolly in the bath’.
● Use structured play. Children with Down syndrome usually need more repetition than other children before they are able to remember and master a task. Your child will benefit if you break down tasks and games into small steps and show them how to complete each step.
● Use imitation as much as possible. Children with Down syndrome tend to be good at learning by imitating or copying other people.
Praise your child and avoid frustration by making sure that most of the time your child gets satisfaction from playing and from toys. It can be very frustrating trying to do things that are beyond your ability. Your child is likely to experience this when they try to play with toys that need precise finger movements – they will express frustration by throwing or banging. When a young child gets frustrated, it can be quite hard for him/her to get over it. Music, holding hands and jigging or dancing are all good ways of getting over upsets.
Learning to communicate
Learning to communicate is one of the most important things that children do. Talking is a powerful tool for learning and communicating with other people and it supports thinking, remembering and reasoning. Learning
language benefits all other areas of development. Each new word that a child acquires is a new concept or piece of information about the world.
Most children with Down syndrome are keen to communicate. However, many find it hard to learn to talk. They may experience difficulty with receptive language (what they understand), expressive language (what they say or sign) and/or speech production skills (how they pronounce words).
Who can help?
Your child is likely to benefit from support and advice from a speech and language therapist. They can give you practical ideas and advice on how to develop your child’s communication skills. Regular advice and input from a speech and language therapist is desirable from six months of age or earlier.
Children are learning language all the time, and you are in the best position to develop your child’s skills. Part of the therapist’s role is to give you ideas and activities that you can incorporate into your daily routines
and communication with your child.
What you can do
● Make sure your child’s hearing is checked regularly – many problems with learning to talk are associated with hearing difficulties.
● Talk to your child as you engage in daily activities together such as dressing, bathing, going shopping, playing and going to the park.
● Name, and talk about, the things your child is looking at and is interested in.
● Read books together, pointing to the pictures.
● Encourage your child to make lots of meaningful simple sounds such as animal noises and everyday noises.
● When your child makes a sound, imitate it and show him/her how pleased you are.
● Encourage your child to play games with his/her lips and tongue by showing them licking, up and down, and in and out movements.
● Play games to teach vocabulary and sentences – your home visiting teacher or speech and language therapist can give you some ideas.
● When your child starts to say words, try not to correct your child’s speech – say the word correctly and clearly yourself instead.
Using signing
Children with Down syndrome are often good visual learners, and therefore you may be able to help them to understand by using signs and gestures. Many babies and toddlers understand more language than they can use (in other words, their receptive language is better than their expressive language). For this reason, learning to sign and using signs at the same time as you speak can help children communicate and get
their message across. It can reduce frustration.
Signing can give your child a way of communicating before they are ready or able to use speech. It does not discourage children from talking – the evidence suggests that children who use signing go on to use spoken words earlier than those who don’t.
What you can do
● Always use speech at the same time as you sign, to help your child develop spoken language.
● Use signs yourself, as well as teaching your child to sign. When you use signs in everyday life, it helps understanding, particularly if a child has hearing difficulties.
● Make sure that your child can see what you’re doing when you’re signing. The best way of doing this is to use sign when you are next to something your child is looking at or to sign when your child is looking at you.
● Sign the information in picture books by putting your child on your lap, with their back towards you and signing in front of them, with your hands above the pages of the book.
● Make sure you teach lots of different types of signs – for actions and describing as well as the names of everyday things in your child’s world.
Using reading activities
Reading is fun and useful in its own right, but it can also be a powerful way to develop spoken language in children with Down syndrome when they begin to join words together – usually between two and three years of age.
What you can do
● Make your own simple books of photographs/pictures of everyday
objects, family members and everyday events to introduce early words
and sentences in print.
● Play word and picture matching games, to teach word recognition.
Developing attention and memory skills
In order to learn, children have to take in information about their surroundings, usually by looking, listening or touching, and pay attention long enough to take in information and to remember it. Attention and
memory skills help children do these things.
The ways that babies with Down syndrome pay attention to the world around them varies a lot. Some children like to look at things, especially people’s faces, for quite long periods of time, but at other times they
may seem to find it hard to maintain attention.
Children with Down syndrome tend to have relatively good long-term memory, so they often retain the information and skills they have learnt very well. However, their short-term or working memory usually
doesn’t develop at the expected rate. Children may experience particular difficulty with short-term storage of information that they hear. This can have the knock-on effect of slowing down the rate at which they learn language.
What you can do
● Encourage your baby to interact with you in the early months by being lively and responsive.
● Repeat things more often than you usually do. Games like peek-a-boo help, because they naturally build repetition into play and they are fun.
● Encourage your child to develop ‘shared attention’, where you both focus your attention on the same thing, like shaking a rattle, or (later) looking at a picture book together.
● Imitate your child’s actions and sounds. This is a good way to get communication going, and can turn into a fun game as well as holding a child’s attention and encouraging them to learn by imitation.
● Take advantage of your child’s strength as a visual learner by using pictures, signs, print and other visual cues to support what you say.
● Use memory games with your child from around two years of age to help your child develop their memory skills.
Learning how to think and learn
Learning how to think, reason, learn, process and remember information is crucial in any child’s development. Cognitive development is the term most often used to describe all these processes. For most babies and children, cognitive development takes place all day, every day, without any deliberate ‘teaching’ by their parents or anyone else. They pick up knowledge and understanding of the world around them through their senses, with vision and touch being the most important in the first year of life.
Babies constantly watch all the activity around them and explore toys and objects within their reach. As they grow older, children continue to learn through all their everyday activities at home, when out shopping or at the park, and in playschool. Your child will be able to develop some cognitive skills in the same way.
However, they are also likely to need some more deliberate teaching to help them develop these skills through daily activities and structured play sessions.
What you can do
● Help your child understand how to reach the next step in their play by talking about what to do, demonstrating how to do it, and by being interested and joining in.
● From two to three years, consider giving your child the opportunity to join a playgroup or nursery to learn with and from other children of the same age.
I hope these ideas help you get started.
Thanks for reading
My first attempts were instinctive and then over time I built on ideas that I found in books and on the internet. But recently I found some great ideas for early learning for kids with Down Syndrome on Early Support, a document produced by UK's Department for Education and Skills. The information presented here is just what a new parent or a parent of a young child with Down Syndrome needs. Here are some excerpts from this document along with a few videos that I thought make some great points quite beautifully.
Helping your child develop and learn
All children learn a lot in the early years of life and every child learns at his or her own pace. At times, your child may appear to lose skills that you know they have already learnt or slow down in one area of development while pushing ahead in another. There may be unexpected spurts of development. This uneven pattern of development is characteristic of children with Down syndrome.
This section considers development under the following headings:
● Learning to interact with others
● Learning to move and explore
● Learning through play
● Learning to communicate
● Developing attention and memory skills
● Learning how to think and learn
Learning to interact with others
In the first year of life, your baby’s social development is likely to progress relatively well. He or she will probably smile, coo, babble and respond to you. Most infants with Down syndrome are only slightly delayed in their social development and early communication skills, and are usually sensitive to emotional cues.
This is a strength, because the ability to make good relationships with other people has a direct effect on happiness, friendship and inclusion later on.
What you can do
● Enjoy cuddles and social games with your baby as you encourage eye contact, smiling and cooing in the early months of life. Your baby is beginning to learn to communicate through these games.
● Include your child in family activities and create as many opportunities for them to play with other children as possible. Children learn social skills all day, everyday, by being with their family and with other adults
and children.
● Try not to ‘baby’ your child, but encourage age-appropriate behaviour. Over time, this will build self-confidence and prepare your child for life with other children of a similar age.
● Encourage your child to play with other children in a mainstream nursery or playgroup, if you can. Children with Down syndrome are particularly good at learning by watching and imitating others and this makes it easier to learn from other children of the same age and about how to get on with other people.
Learning to move and explore
Reach, grasping and holding (often known as fine motor skills) are important for all babies. These skills allow young children to explore toys and objects in their world, and to develop self-help skills such as feeding
and dressing.
Movement skills like sitting, rolling, crawling and walking are known as gross motor skills. They help babies and children to start exploring on their own. Your child is likely to face significant delay in developing motor skills, which makes it harder to explore and move around. The best way to encourage your child is through play and by motivating them to move, explore, and copy other people.
Who can help?
A physiotherapist or an occupational therapist can offer advice and pass on good ideas. Not all children with Down syndrome need professional help, but they should all be offered a pediatric physiotherapy
assessment in the first three months of life and an occupational therapy assessment at a later stage. If you feel that your baby is making progress and you are giving them lots of play and stimulation you probably don’t need much input from a therapist. However, if you feel your baby is not progressing, ask for help.
For example:
● If your baby is hypotonic (floppy) with poor head control in the early months, ask for ideas on how to handle them and how to improve head control.
● If your baby needs help to play comfortably on his or her tummy, ask for some tips. It sometimes helps to provide more support by putting a rolled towel under the armpits, which lifts the upper trunk. Don’t leave
your baby on their own while they’re lying on their front until you’re sure they can get out of this position safely and without help. Playing on the tummy can help your baby develop a strong neck and back,
and help towards sitting and crawling.
What you can do
● Give your baby the chance to play in different positions during the day and help them to feel and explore toys that they are not yet able to pick up.
● Sing action songs with your child to help them learn about body parts and to encourage them to practice movement.
● As your baby grows into a toddler and young child, use music, movement and sports activities to practice and develop skills. Music, dance and yoga all provide opportunities for children to have fun at the same time as learning to control movement. You might go along to local toddler activity groups, music classes, baby swimming classes, preschool ballet classes, ball pits and soft play areas.
Learning through play
Play is the first, and perhaps the most important way, to help your child learn. All children learn through play and exploration. Children with Down syndrome learn in the same way as other children but often benefit
from more support for their play
What you can do
● Become your baby’s ‘play partner’ and show your child how to play with their toys. Show them what a toy does, how to get it to make a noise or to move, how to screw or unscrew it, how to hide and
find a toy. By demonstrating to your child how to do more interesting things with toys, you can prevent your child getting stuck on repetitive patterns of play.
● Take turns with your baby as a means to demonstrate how to do something. Sometimes it’s helpful to have two toys, so that you can both shake a rattle or bounce a ball.
● Later on, join in with imaginative play to show your child what to do. Imaginative games provide valuable opportunities to teach new language to children. Help your child to link two or three words together as you say ‘Can you wash dolly’s face?’ or ‘Watch me put dolly in the bath’.
● Use structured play. Children with Down syndrome usually need more repetition than other children before they are able to remember and master a task. Your child will benefit if you break down tasks and games into small steps and show them how to complete each step.
● Use imitation as much as possible. Children with Down syndrome tend to be good at learning by imitating or copying other people.
Praise your child and avoid frustration by making sure that most of the time your child gets satisfaction from playing and from toys. It can be very frustrating trying to do things that are beyond your ability. Your child is likely to experience this when they try to play with toys that need precise finger movements – they will express frustration by throwing or banging. When a young child gets frustrated, it can be quite hard for him/her to get over it. Music, holding hands and jigging or dancing are all good ways of getting over upsets.
Learning to communicate
Learning to communicate is one of the most important things that children do. Talking is a powerful tool for learning and communicating with other people and it supports thinking, remembering and reasoning. Learning
language benefits all other areas of development. Each new word that a child acquires is a new concept or piece of information about the world.
Most children with Down syndrome are keen to communicate. However, many find it hard to learn to talk. They may experience difficulty with receptive language (what they understand), expressive language (what they say or sign) and/or speech production skills (how they pronounce words).
Who can help?
Your child is likely to benefit from support and advice from a speech and language therapist. They can give you practical ideas and advice on how to develop your child’s communication skills. Regular advice and input from a speech and language therapist is desirable from six months of age or earlier.
Children are learning language all the time, and you are in the best position to develop your child’s skills. Part of the therapist’s role is to give you ideas and activities that you can incorporate into your daily routines
and communication with your child.
What you can do
● Make sure your child’s hearing is checked regularly – many problems with learning to talk are associated with hearing difficulties.
● Talk to your child as you engage in daily activities together such as dressing, bathing, going shopping, playing and going to the park.
● Name, and talk about, the things your child is looking at and is interested in.
● Read books together, pointing to the pictures.
● Encourage your child to make lots of meaningful simple sounds such as animal noises and everyday noises.
● When your child makes a sound, imitate it and show him/her how pleased you are.
● Encourage your child to play games with his/her lips and tongue by showing them licking, up and down, and in and out movements.
● Play games to teach vocabulary and sentences – your home visiting teacher or speech and language therapist can give you some ideas.
● When your child starts to say words, try not to correct your child’s speech – say the word correctly and clearly yourself instead.
Using signing
Children with Down syndrome are often good visual learners, and therefore you may be able to help them to understand by using signs and gestures. Many babies and toddlers understand more language than they can use (in other words, their receptive language is better than their expressive language). For this reason, learning to sign and using signs at the same time as you speak can help children communicate and get
their message across. It can reduce frustration.
Signing can give your child a way of communicating before they are ready or able to use speech. It does not discourage children from talking – the evidence suggests that children who use signing go on to use spoken words earlier than those who don’t.
What you can do
● Always use speech at the same time as you sign, to help your child develop spoken language.
● Use signs yourself, as well as teaching your child to sign. When you use signs in everyday life, it helps understanding, particularly if a child has hearing difficulties.
● Make sure that your child can see what you’re doing when you’re signing. The best way of doing this is to use sign when you are next to something your child is looking at or to sign when your child is looking at you.
● Sign the information in picture books by putting your child on your lap, with their back towards you and signing in front of them, with your hands above the pages of the book.
● Make sure you teach lots of different types of signs – for actions and describing as well as the names of everyday things in your child’s world.
Using reading activities
Reading is fun and useful in its own right, but it can also be a powerful way to develop spoken language in children with Down syndrome when they begin to join words together – usually between two and three years of age.
What you can do
● Make your own simple books of photographs/pictures of everyday
objects, family members and everyday events to introduce early words
and sentences in print.
● Play word and picture matching games, to teach word recognition.
Developing attention and memory skills
In order to learn, children have to take in information about their surroundings, usually by looking, listening or touching, and pay attention long enough to take in information and to remember it. Attention and
memory skills help children do these things.
The ways that babies with Down syndrome pay attention to the world around them varies a lot. Some children like to look at things, especially people’s faces, for quite long periods of time, but at other times they
may seem to find it hard to maintain attention.
Children with Down syndrome tend to have relatively good long-term memory, so they often retain the information and skills they have learnt very well. However, their short-term or working memory usually
doesn’t develop at the expected rate. Children may experience particular difficulty with short-term storage of information that they hear. This can have the knock-on effect of slowing down the rate at which they learn language.
What you can do
● Encourage your baby to interact with you in the early months by being lively and responsive.
● Repeat things more often than you usually do. Games like peek-a-boo help, because they naturally build repetition into play and they are fun.
● Encourage your child to develop ‘shared attention’, where you both focus your attention on the same thing, like shaking a rattle, or (later) looking at a picture book together.
● Imitate your child’s actions and sounds. This is a good way to get communication going, and can turn into a fun game as well as holding a child’s attention and encouraging them to learn by imitation.
● Take advantage of your child’s strength as a visual learner by using pictures, signs, print and other visual cues to support what you say.
● Use memory games with your child from around two years of age to help your child develop their memory skills.
Learning how to think and learn
Learning how to think, reason, learn, process and remember information is crucial in any child’s development. Cognitive development is the term most often used to describe all these processes. For most babies and children, cognitive development takes place all day, every day, without any deliberate ‘teaching’ by their parents or anyone else. They pick up knowledge and understanding of the world around them through their senses, with vision and touch being the most important in the first year of life.
Babies constantly watch all the activity around them and explore toys and objects within their reach. As they grow older, children continue to learn through all their everyday activities at home, when out shopping or at the park, and in playschool. Your child will be able to develop some cognitive skills in the same way.
However, they are also likely to need some more deliberate teaching to help them develop these skills through daily activities and structured play sessions.
What you can do
● Help your child understand how to reach the next step in their play by talking about what to do, demonstrating how to do it, and by being interested and joining in.
● From two to three years, consider giving your child the opportunity to join a playgroup or nursery to learn with and from other children of the same age.
I hope these ideas help you get started.
Thanks for reading
