Your Child’s Development Birth – 8 Months

Milestones: By eight months, most babies can:

• Sit up on their own.
• Move things from one hand to the other.
• Use fingers to move food towards themselves.
• Sit without support.

Babies will naturally learn new skills and likely move from one skill to the next without being “taught” how to do the next thing.

Body Awareness and Control:

• Babies will begin developing predictable sleeping, eating, and toileting patterns.
• Babies need plenty of time to move freely on their back, in a safe space. This gives your baby a chance to practice moving hands, arms, feet, and legs.

Muscle Development and Coordination:

• Babies will develop head and body stability. Babies will start lying on their backs and playing with their feet, and then they will begin to roll from their back to their front.
• Babies will begin to use both hands to hold something in front of them while lying on their backs. When your baby starts reaching for things, you can place a few simple toys within their reach. It will take a while for them to get good at grasping things, but practice will build their skills. You can put toys slightly beyond their reach so that they can work towards getting to them.
• Babies will start getting up on hands and knees and rocking back and forth.
• Babies will then move from hands and knees into a sitting position.

Nutrition: 

• Your baby will suck and swallow liquids and associate breast or bottle with being fed.

Safety: 

• Your baby will cry to indicate stress and to seek help.
• When your baby starts to crawl, creating an even larger, safe space for him to explore is important.
• Be careful not to leave a baby out of arm’s reach on a high surface like a bed or table.

Milestones: By eight months, most babies can:

• Take turns making sounds with you.
• Blow “raspberries” (stick out tongue and blow).
• Make noises other than crying, such as squealing and cooing.

Communication: Your baby is communicating from the day they are born. Infants use crying, sounds, and gestures to communicate their feelings, needs, and ideas.

Expressive Communication/ Expressive Language:

• Even young babies and their family members have “conversations,” where the baby coos or babbles and waits, and the adult talks back to the baby. Starting with these conversations, infants begin to learn how conversations go, enjoy the experience of being “listened to,” and eagerly take in the words their families are saying to them.
• When they start saying words, sometimes they say a part of the word, like the beginning or the end, or they might make sounds that sound like the rhythm of the word. Their sounds will start to have meaning. Your baby may say “m-m-m-m-m” when asking for mama.
• Babies will use gestures to communicate. Gestures include waving for “bye-bye,” arms up for “pick me up,” and shaking head from side to side to resist eating a certain food.

Receptive Communication/Receptive Language:

• Speak to your baby as you would speak to another adult without using “baby talk” or simplifying your words.
• Listening to the language of their families, children soon start to distinguish familiar sounds and to build a vocabulary of words they understand, even before they can. Babies at this age understand more words than they can speak
• Babies begin to understand the meaning of tone as well as words. For instance, they can notice when your tone is excited, loving, frustrated, or scared and will eventually learn how to use tone in their own conversations.

Emergent Reading

• Children use books as any other object by exploring with hands and mouth. This looks like your baby grabbing a board book or fabric book and putting the book in their mouth to chew on it.
• Read books to your baby. This is your baby’s first experience of “reading” and the beginning step to understanding that books hold stories, words, and information for your baby.

Your baby is developing problem-solving skills that will allow them to pay attention to things they find interesting, even when there are distractions. For example, your baby can make eye contact with their family members even while music is playing. As your baby grows, they may learn to stack a few blocks even when someone nearby is folding the laundry. This ability to concentrate on something helps them observe, gather information, build on their learning experiences, and find solutions to problems. Around this time, they may begin to:

• Start to show interest in faces, track moving objects with their eyes,
• Recognize familiar people and objects and explore their environment using their senses.
• They will also begin coordinating their visual and auditory senses, reaching for objects, and showing curiosity in bright colors and patterns.

Tips for supporting cognitive learning:

• Narrate your day and describe what you’re doing.
• Sing to your baby to soothe them and enhance their auditory skills and memory.
• Use colorful board books and read to your baby daily. Point to pictures and describe them to capture their attention and introduce them to new words.
• Offer toys with different textures, shapes, and sounds. Soft rattles, colorful blocks, and textured balls stimulate their senses and curiosity.
• Place toys just out of reach to motivate your baby to reach and grasp to enhance their motor skills and problem-solving abilities.
• Mimic your baby’s actions and sounds to encourage them to repeat and learn through imitation.
• Point out and name objects around the house or during walks to help them make connections between words and objects as they explore their world.
• Allow your baby to explore their environment safely. This encourages inquiry and helps them understand cause and effect. These everyday interactions and playful moments are essential for your baby’s cognitive and emotional growth, setting the stage for lifelong learning.

Early Math Skills for Babies

Babies start building math skills long before they can talk or go to school. Simple everyday activities, like playing or talking with your baby, can help them learn important concepts such as numbers, size, and patterns.

What are babies learning about numbers?

Young children begin to practice the skills needed for arithmetic and math long before they enter elementary school. Most of these skills are developed through play and simple interactions with adults.

• Young infants are developing early ideas about numbers, even before they can talk. They begin by focusing on one thing at a time. They will reach for a toy you hold out to them. An infant will watch their dad as he walks toward them in a room full of people.
• Infants are introduced to counting skills through everyday interactions, such as parents counting their fingers and toes or getting two kisses, one on each cheek.
• As babies approach 8 months of age, when they hold two toys in each hand, and you offer a third toy, they may drop one of the toys they are holding so that they can hold onto the new object. This shows a beginning understanding of what “two” is.

Source: https://allaboutyoungchildren.org/english/birth-to-8-months/#soc-emot

Tips to support Number Sense development:

• Feeding Time: When feeding your baby, talk about quantity. For example, say, “Are you full, or do you want more milk?”
• Diaper Changes: Point to your nose and then to your baby’s nose, saying, “This is my nose, and this is your nose.” This helps your baby start learning about matching objects, a key math concept called one-to-one correspondence.