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The aspect of the newborn stage that I am going to be focusing on is one of the reflexes which is the sucking stage. The sucking reflex starts to develop during the 32nd week of pregnancy and is usually fully developed by the 36th week of pregnancy. This is one of the photos that was in my baby book, and when I was about 3 months old is when I began to find my thumb. My mother says that when I began sucking my thumb at 3 months I was able to put myself to sleep and that is when I was able to sleep through the night.

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In infancy one area of focus is the development of gross motor skills. There is a sequence of gross motor skills that infants will complete such as rolling over, sitting up, crawling, creeping, walking, and running. This photo shows one of my attempts at walking. I took my first steps when I was 11 months old on may 15th 2005. My mother wrote that after a couple of weeks I was already moving quickly and eventually started running. This skill allowed me to run around and play with my cousins who I was always trying to keep up with. My parents say after I learned to walk/run they had to but barriers on things because I was constantly running into things.

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Throughout early childhood I started to involve larger muscle movements into my daily life. At age four I started participating in sports such as t-ball (shown in the photo above) and soccer which became such a big part of my life. My favorite part of t-ball was running the bases, running was definitely my favorite activity as a child and that love stayed with me for the rest of my life as I went on the compete in track and field for my entire middle and high school career. Participating in these gross motor skills did much more than help with muscle control and increased muscle activity but it set a foundation for what I loved to do as I got older.

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The one aspect of early childhood cognitive development that I am going to be focusing on is reading. It is very important for children to be exposed to reading at a very young age. Parents should start reading to their child as soon as possible. This has many benefits as your child will be stimulated in the mind and it helps with their sense of developing imagination, real world skills, and word recognition. This picture is a photo of my dad and I reading a book. I would look at the books and was read them so much before I even learned how to read that I eventually memorized the words. My parents would always read to me so I grew up loving to read books. Even though I was young for my grade I still was reading at the same level as my peers because my family would read to me since I was a baby.

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During the early childhood stage the way friendships develop and evolve will change greatly from the ages 3-6. Kids also recognize that people are different from each other and they begin to gain self esteem and evaluate judgements. Preference towards playmates also starts. At this age I was a very shy child, and as you can tell from the picture I (on the far left) was timid when I was around a group of kids that I was not familiar with. When I was this age I only had a couple of friends and did not have a very outgoing personality.

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During the middle childhood phase of life motor skills are much more developed than they were in early childhood. Children have enchanted gross motor skills such as an increase in balance, coordination, and strength. This is about the age where sports for middle childhood help maintain the fitness for the child. These gross motor skills helped greatly with playing soccer. This is about the age where I really started to enjoy soccer and it was partly because I had these new set of skills that helped me have more power and strength. Endurance also started to increase as well as the length of our games. My grandma would bring me oranges after my games which is what this photo is showing, my family is big on maintaining a good nutrition which also helped greatly with my athletic ability.

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These two photos represent the growth in cognitive drawing skills during middle childhood. During this age range a childs ability to understand and master complex skills increases. The working memory and information processing skills also increase which helps develop cognitive skills. The photo on the left shows a drawing of a self portrait I drew when I was 6 years old. The photo on the left shows a self portrait from when I was 11 years old. As you can see on the left everything was drawn in color and the features are not as pronounced and specific as they are in the drawing on the right. The drawing on the right shows growth in cognitive and fine motor skills because it looks cleaner, more personalized, and more realistic.

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Social development at the middle childhood age is a lot different from the early childhood age. Children are beginning to evaluate their own behavior and they will start to compare themselves to the people around them. Self-esteem is also a big thing at this age which also goes along with the social comparison they are making. As I got older I was a lot more social but I was still shy and timid until I reached the age of 12. This photo is from when I was ten years old and I was a part of a running club at my school. At this age I was a lot more comfortable around big groups of kids compared to when I was at the preschool age. However this is when I started to compare myself to other people and I got self conscious about what I was doing.