Baby Development Stages: The First Year

From helpless newborn to active toddler: It takes just 12 short months for your baby to undergo this incredible transformation. Babies grow and change at an astounding pace, and every month brings new and exciting developments.

New moms and dads often wonder what to expect next and how to know if their baby’s development is on target. Instead of focusing too much on developmental milestones, however, it’s important to remember that babies all develop at their own pace. There’s a fairly wide “window” for when it is normal for a baby to reach a particular developmental stage.

“If your baby reaches one milestone sooner, she may reach another one later, because she’s so busy perfecting the other skill,” says Jennifer Shu, MD, pediatrician and co-author of Heading Home with Your Newborn.

Some babies may say their first word at eight months, while others don’t talk until a little after the one-year mark. And walking may start anytime between nine and 18 months.

Keeping those kinds of variations in mind, here’s what your baby may be doing during each three-month stage of the first year.

During this first development stage, babies’ bodies and brains are learning to live in the outside world. Between birth and three months, your baby may start to:

Smile. Early on, it will be just to herself. But within three months, she’ll be smiling in response to your smiles and trying to get you to smile back at her.Raise her head and chest when on her tummy.Track objects with her eyes and gradually decrease eye crossing.Open and shut her hands and bring hands to her mouth.Grip objects in her hands.Take swipes at or reach for dangling objects, though she usually won’t be able to get them yet.

During these months, babies are really learning to reach out and manipulate the world around them. They’re mastering the use of those amazing tools, their hands. And they’re discovering their voices. From 4 to 6 months old, your baby will probably:

Roll over from front to back or back to front. Front-to-back usually comes first.Babble, making sounds that can sound like real language.Laugh.Reach out for and grab objects (watch out for your hair), and manipulate toys and other objects with her hands.Sit up with support and have great head control.

During the second half of this year, your little one becomes a baby on the go. After learning that he can get somewhere by rolling over, he’ll spend the next few months figuring out how to move forward or backward. If you haven’t baby-proofed yet, better get on it!

During this time period, your baby may:Start to crawl. This can include scooting (propelling around on his bottom) or “army crawling” (dragging himself on his tummy by arms and legs), as well as standard crawling on hands and knees. Some babies never crawl, moving directly to from scooting to walking.Sit without support.Respond to familiar words like his name. He may also respond to “No” by briefly stopping and looking at you, and may start babbling "Mama" and "Dada."Clap and play games such as patty-cake and peekaboo.Learn to pull up to a standing position.

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Just Started Our First Lap Book!

Recently, I was introduced to Lap Books. I'd never heard of them before, but I was intrigued, so I went to the "In the Hands of a Child" website and took a look around. They have a bunch of different lap books in a huge number of categories.

My daughter is in 3rd grade and absolutely loves Voyage of the Dawn Treader. So I thought the first lap book to try should be one on this awesome book by C.S. Lewis. She starts book reports this year and I thought it would be fun to do something a little different than the "normal" book report.

I remember loving reading books for school, but I always dreaded the required book report at the end! It was tedious to me, having to spit out in my own words the story I had just read. So I wanted to do something more fun with my daughter, so that she would continue her love for reading without it being squelched by the "looming" book report!

She just finished her first day, which was to read a biography on the author and to learn a few vocabulary words. At first, she protested when she heard that she would have to read about the author, instead of getting into the first chapter of the book right away. But I gently coaxed her by telling her that she was going to learn a little bit about the person who wrote the book so that she could appreciate the book even more.

After she finished reading the biography, I asked her what she had learned. With a sparkle in her eye, she listed off a dozen things about C.S. Lewis! Now, normally when I tell her to write about what she has learned, she gives me a whine about how she "can't" do THAT! But this time she was eager to write down what she had learned. Maybe it was because what she was writing on was not the same old, same old white writing paper that she normally uses. This time it was a brightly colored cut-out in the shape of a miniature book. It's amazing how a little thing like that can be a motivator!

The vocabulary words also became a joy, when she saw that she would be "making" something out of them. She was so excited about her first day with the lap book, that she couldn't wait to tell her daddy about it!

I have high hopes for the rest of the book report, too. Each day has a new activity to do that really encourages and involved the child in what they are learning.

If you have never tried a lap book, I highly recommend it. They aren't expensive, and you can even download them as e-books immediately!

If you have tried lap books, please leave a comment with your experiences!

I am a stay at home mother of five children. I love homechooling my children and teaching them to live healthy lives. I enjoy staying healthy and fit and love helping others to do the same!

Please visit Superfit Homeschool Mom and join me on my fitness journey!

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First-Place Sweep by American Girls at First Google Science Fair

In 11th grade Ms. Bose, a 17-year-old in Fort Worth, tackled ovarian cancer, and that research won her the grand prize and $50,000 in the Google Science Fair last week.

For the winning research Ms. Bose looked at a chemotherapy drug, cisplatin, that is commonly taken by women with ovarian cancer. The problem is that the cancer cells tend to grow resistant to cisplatin over time, and Ms. Bose set out to find a way to counteract that.

She found the answer in a cellular energy protein known as AMPK, or adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase. She observed that when AMPK was paired with cisplatin at the beginning of treatment the combination diminished the effectiveness of cisplatin. But added later on, when the cancer cells were growing resistant, the AMPK worked to maintain the effectiveness of cisplatin, allowing it to continue killing the malignant cells, at least in cell cultures.

“That opens up a lot of new avenues for research,” Ms. Bose said. Her research was supervised by Dr. Alakananda Basu at the University of North Texas Health Science Center in Fort Worth.?

More than 10,000 students from 91 countries entered the science fair, which was Google’s first. The entries, submitted over the Web, were winnowed down to 60 semifinalists and then 15 finalists who presented their findings to judges at Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters last week.

Ms. Bose’s research was named best in the age 17-18 category and best of show over all. Her prize includes $50,000 for future college studies, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands and a separate trip to visit the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland.

Girls swept all three age categories in the competition, a contrast to generations past when women were largely excluded from the science world.

“Personally I think that’s amazing, because throughout my entire life, I’ve heard science is a field where men go into,” Ms. Bose said. “It just starts to show you that women are stepping up in science, and I’m excited that I was able to represent maybe just a little bit of that.” She will start her senior year of high school in the fall.

“At the end, we were like, ‘Yeah, girl power!’?” said Naomi Shah of Portland, Ore., who won the age 15-16 category with a study of the effects of air quality on lungs, particularly for people who have asthma. Ms. Shah recruited 103 test subjects, performed 24-hour air quality measurements at their homes and workplaces and had each blow into a device that measured the force of their breath.

Lauren Hodge of Dallastown, Pa., won the age 13-14 category for research on whether marinades reduce the amount of cancer-causing compounds produced by the grilling of meat. She found that lemon juice and brown sugar cut the level of carcinogens sharply, while soy sauce increased them.

Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist and one of the judges, said that gender did not play a role in deciding the winners. “This was a gender-neutral evaluation of all the work that was done,” he said. Nonetheless, “I was secretly very pleased to see that happen,” Dr. Cerf said. “This is just a reminder that women are fully capable of doing same or better quality work than men can.”

The gender tables are not entirely turned among budding scientists. Nowadays the competitors at science fairs are pretty evenly split between boys and girls, both Ms. Bose and Ms. Shah said, and 9 of the 15 finalists in the Google Science Fair were boys.

“I think that was just, like, pure coincidence,” Ms. Shah said of the girls’ sweep, “because all 15 finalists had great projects.”

Perhaps belying a bit the notion that American students are falling behind in science, the United States dominated the top slots. All three of the winners were American, as were nearly three-quarters of the finalists. About 60 percent of the entries came from Americans.

Dr. Cerf said that a common thread among the finalists was that they had explored science enthusiastically for years with the encouragement of their parents.

For Ms. Bose, it was the blue spinach that got her started. “I actually decided that children didn’t want to eat their vegetables because they were green, and so my fantastic idea for the science fair project was to turn a spinach plant blue,” she recalled.

She repeatedly injected blue food coloring into a spinach plant, and a few weeks later she took to school a shriveled, stained vegetable — she had forgotten to water it — and explained that children would happily eat spinach if only it were blue.

“Sounds like a weird beginning, but after that I just realized that science is cool, it’s something I want to do,” said Ms. Bose, who eventually hopes to get a doctorate and a medical degree so that she can both treat patients and look for new cures. “And it’s just been getting better from there.”

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First: No, Seriously: No Excuses

Photo Illustration by Ruud Van Empel/Stux Gallery

In the early days of the education-reform movement, a decade or so ago, you’d often hear from reformers a powerful rallying cry: “No excuses.” For too long, they said, poverty had been used as an excuse by complacent educators and bureaucrats who refused to believe that poor students could achieve at high levels. Reform-minded school leaders took the opposite approach, insisting that students in the South Bronx should be held to the same standards as kids in Scarsdale. Amazingly enough, those high expectations often paid off, producing test results at some low-income urban schools that would impress parents in any affluent suburb.

Ten years later, you might think that reformers would be feeling triumphant. Spurred in part by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, many states have passed laws reformers have long advocated: allowing for more charter schools, weakening teachers’ tenure protections, compensating teachers in part based on their students’ performance. But in fact, the mood in the reform camp seems increasingly anxious and defensive.

Last month, Diane Ravitch, an education scholar who has emerged as the most potent critic of the reform movement, wrote an Op-Ed for this newspaper arguing that raising high-poverty schools to consistently high levels of proficiency is much more difficult and less common than reformers make it out to be. When politicians hold up specific schools in low-income neighborhoods as success stories, Ravitch wrote, those successes often turn out, on closer examination, to be less spectacular than they appear. She mentioned the Bruce Randolph School in Denver, which President Obama singled out in his 2011 State of the Union address as an example of “what good schools can do,” and the Urban Prep Academy in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, which the education secretary, Arne Duncan, praised in a speech in February. Each school graduates a very high percentage of its seniors, but, Ravitch said, test scores at those schools suggested that students were below average in the basic academic skills necessary for success in college and in life.

The backlash was quick and intense. Duncan said that Ravitch was “insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day.” Jonathan Alter, a columnist for Bloomberg View, wrote that she was “sliming reformers” and later, when he and Ravitch appeared together on a Denver radio show, accused her of “abusing statistics” in her analysis of the schools’ achievement-test scores.

The Bruce Randolph school, Alter explained, “should not be compared to other Colorado schools in affluent neighborhoods”; to consider Randolph’s scores alongside those of white, middle-class schools was like “comparing apples and oranges.” Instead, he argued, the school should be judged on the “stunning” fact that its ninth-grade writing-proficiency rates had doubled since 2007, improving to 15 percent of the class from 7 percent, and that its ninth-grade math-proficiency rates had risen to 14 percent of the class from 5 percent.

A week later, the founder of Urban Prep, Tim King, took to The Huffington Post to defend his school against Ravitch’s charges. King acknowledged that just 17 percent of his 11th-grade students passed the statewide achievement test last year, while in the Chicago public schools as a whole, the comparable figure was 29 percent. But echoing Alter’s fruit metaphor, he wrote that Ravitch was comparing “apples to grapefruits” by holding the students at Urban Prep, who are almost all black males from low-income families, to the standards of “children from all across Chicago.”

To point out the obvious: These are excuses. In fact, they are the very same excuses for failure that the education-reform movement was founded to oppose. (If early reformers believed in anything, it was that every student is an apple.) And not only are they excuses; they aren’t even particularly persuasive ones. By any reasonable measure, students at Bruce Randolph are doing very badly. The average ACT score at Randolph last year was 14, the second-lowest average of any high school in Denver, placing students in the bottom 10 percent of ACT test-takers nationwide. In the middle school, composite scores on state tests put students at the first percentile in reading and writing (meaning that at 99 percent of Colorado schools, students are scoring better), and at the fifth percentile in math. As for Urban Prep: demographic data show that the school’s students are not, in fact, disadvantaged grapefruits among well-to-do apples when compared with the city’s student population as a whole; 84 percent of its students are low-income and 99.8 percent are nonwhite, while in Chicago public schools, 86 percent of students are low-income and 91 percent are nonwhite.

Paul Tough, a contributing writer, is the author of “Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America.” His next book, “The Success Equation,” will be published next year.

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Auburn Is First in One Ranking, 85th in Another

Auburn’s top-ranked football team, which is preparing to play Oregon in Glendale, Ariz., for the national title on Monday, has tumbled in the N.C.A.A.’s most important academic measurement to No. 85 from No. 4 among the 120 major college football programs.

The decline came after the university closed several academic loopholes following a New York Times article in 2006 that showed numerous football players padded their grade-point averages and remained eligible through independent-study-style courses that required little or no work. Auburn has earned a certain sort of praise from those who were its toughest critics in 2006.

“Auburn was in a rogue position and they corrected it,” said Gordon Gee, who in 2006, when he was Vanderbilt’s chancellor, was stunned that Auburn was ranked higher than his university. Gee is now president of Ohio State. “When those loopholes are closed and the issue is dramatically different, it shows that the loophole was being used. I applaud Auburn. They really did make a concerted effort to curb those abuses. We should applaud them even if they dropped 80 points.”

Auburn’s drop in the Academic Progress Rate, a four-year assessment of the movement toward graduation for a team’s players, is the third largest in college football since 2006, behind Mississippi’s (to 113 from 18) and Florida State’s (to 105 from 17). Since 2006, both Florida State and Michigan have endured academic scandals, with Michigan’s ranking falling to 84 from 27.

Among all the bowl teams this season, Auburn has the highest disparity in the graduation rates between white players (100 percent) and black players (49 percent), according to a study at the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

Jim Gundlach, the Auburn sociology professor who uncovered the academic abuse, saw the decline in the team’s ranking as progress. “A genuine consequence to this has been that the people who want to do things right have gotten a bit more grasp over what the university is trying to do,” he said.

Auburn’s athletic director, Jay Jacobs, declined to comment. The Tigers’ second-year football coach, Gene Chizik, said of his team’s academic performance and support, “We do a great job, so we’re not concerned with that.” When pressed on the issue of graduating black players, Chizik said, “Those are circumstances; there’s all kinds of different things.”

In 2006, Auburn football was No. 1 among public universities in the academic ranking, alongside private institutions like Duke and Boston College. But some irregularities had caught Gundlach’s attention two years earlier.

He saw on television that an academic football player of the week was an Auburn sociology major, yet Gundlach was surprised that he had never had him in class. He asked two other sociology professors, who also did not recall having him as their student. Gundlach dug through records and soon found that Auburn football players were graduating as sociology majors without taking sociology courses in the classroom.

He found that 18 players on Auburn’s undefeated 2004 team had taken 97 directed-reading course hours — independent study-style classes — from Thomas Petee, the sociology department’s highest-ranking member. Petee taught 252 independent studies in one academic year, 2004-5, astounding Auburn faculty members, who said that overseeing 10 independent studies would be considered ambitious.

In investigating the situation, the university found that another professor, James Witte, had taught an inordinate number of directed-reading classes. The investigation did not find fault in the athletic department because the courses were available to and taken by all students.

The N.C.A.A. investigation yielded secondary violations. Witte, the program coordinator for adult education, and Petee stepped down as department chairmen, and Petee was later forced to stop teaching after an audit revealed that he had changed grades without the approval of professors.

Petee did not respond to a request seeking comment, and a woman who answered the telephone at his house said that he was not available. Petee’s lawyer also declined to comment. Witte did not return a call or respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Another factor in Auburn’s precipitous drop was the university’s decision to hire Chizik to replace Tommy Tuberville as the football coach two years ago. Kevin Lennon, the N.C.A.A. vice president for membership services, said that rankings can dip after coaching changes because of the number of players who transfer.

But Thomas S. Paskus, the N.C.A.A.’s principal research scientist, said that a drop as large as Auburn’s was irregular.

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