Learning about Life Span Development

I thought I would tell you a little bit about one of the courses we just recently completed, Life Span Development.  It was our first big course and very interesting. 

We covered the development of children from conception to the end of adolescence.  That was a lot of ground to cover! Even though I am a mother and have been through labour and childbirth, I learned things that I didn’t know.  Our instructor for the course was great and made our course come alive.  For one of the lectures our instructor made one of the guys in our class into a sperm.  That was really funny and a good way to remember the concepts of conception.  Our instructor was also great at bringing in stories that were relevant to the course and the concepts of the day to help us remember the topic of the day.  He sure knew how to keep the lectures interesting.

We learnt all about the different theorists and their perspectives on childhood development.  We started at Freud and Piaget and continued from there.  As a parent it has helped me to see my child’s development in a whole new light and to understand where he is and better know how to help him along.  It also helps to be able to understand the different stages that all children will go through whether they have exceptionalities or not.

In this course we had lots of hands-on activities in class and lively class discussions.  We discussed the various aspects of each theorist and their approaches.  It was interesting to see how this would apply to our work as a future SEA.  I had never considered before how we would need to know all these different theories but I can see now how useful they will be not only in my own personal life but as an SEA.

One of the other topics that we studied in this course was the various styles of parenting and the types of children that you generally see with each style of parenting.  We each then looked at what style of parenting we were raised in and did we fit that type of child when we were young. There was lots of opportunity for self-reflection in this course and time to apply what we were learning.

I found this course to be a fascinating course and one which I have continued to use as I am progressing through my program.  The concepts that I learnt have continued to come up in the other courses.  I also find that I am using the things I learnt in my own life with my son, and in my volunteer work as a Sunday School teacher.  At the end of our course, we had an amazing potluck to celeberate the completion of Life Span Development.

We have had lots of great experiences on Campus with potlucks, a Halloween door decorating contest and a gingerbread house making contest.  This is a great place to go to school.