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Appendix

California Infant/Toddler Learning & Development Foundations.

Summary of Infant/Toddler Foundations

Social-Emotional Development
  • Interactions with Adults: The developing ability to respond to and engage with adults
  • Relationships with Adults: The development of close relationships with certain adults who provide consistent nurturance
  • Interactions with Peers: The developing ability to respond to and engage with other children
  • Relationships with Peers: The development of relationships with certain peers through interactions over time
  • Identity of Self in Relation to Others: The developing concept that the child is an individual operating within social relationships
  • Recognition of Ability: The developing understanding that the child can take action to influence the environment
  • Expression of Emotion: The developing ability to express a variety of feelings through facial expressions, movements, gestures, sounds, or words
  • Empathy: The developing ability to share in the emotional experiences of others
  • Emotion Regulation: The developing ability to manage emotional responses with assistance from others and independently
  • Impulse Control: The developing capacity to wait for needs to be met, to inhibit potentially hurtful behavior, and to act according to social expectations, including safety rules
  • Social Understanding: The developing understanding of the responses, communication, emotional expressions, and actions of other people
Language Development
  • Receptive Language: The developing ability to understand words and increasingly complex utterances
  • Expressive Language: The developing ability to produce the sounds of language and use vocabulary and increasingly complex utterances
  • Communication Skills and Knowledge: The developing ability to communicate nonverbally and verbally
  • Interest in Print: The developing interest in engaging with print in books and in the environment
Cognitive Development
  • Cause-and-Effect: The developing understanding that one event brings about another
  • Spatial Relationships: The developing understanding of how things move and fit in space
  • Problem Solving: The developing ability to engage in a purposeful effort to reach a goal or figure out how something works
  • Imitation: The developing ability to mirror, repeat, and practice the actions of others, either immediately or later
  • Memory: The developing ability to store and later retrieve information about past experiences
  • Number Sense: The developing understanding of number and quantity
  • Classification: The developing ability to group, sort, categorize, connect, and have expectations of objects and people according to their attributes
  • Symbolic Play: The developing ability to use actions, objects, or ideas to represent other actions, objects, or ideas
  • Attention Maintenance: The developing ability to attend to people and things while interacting with others and exploring the environment and play materials
  • Understanding of Personal Care Routines: The developing ability to understand and participate in personal care routines
Perceptual and Motor Development
  • Perceptual Development: The developing ability to become aware of the social and physical environment through the senses
  • Gross Motor: The developing ability to move the large muscles
  • Fine Motor: The developing ability to move the small muscles

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Questions:   Early Education Division | 916-322-6233
Last Reviewed: Tuesday, January 28, 2025
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