What really matters- Applied Knowledge. A real simple example of how Whit uses her new spatial reasoning powers is stair climbing. New toddlers love to climb stairs and seem like they could do it all day. Not only does it exercise their new movement and mobility, but it exercises their knowledge of space and size and how to navigate through their world. Each step is a mini quiz in judging height and distance and moving body accordingly.

How to put it into practice-

Tuning In- It is immediately obvious that going upstairs is easier than going down stairs. Going up, Whit can leverage her hands and upper body on the stairs above where she is taking the step (see video- Going Up). Going down, there is none of that extra support. The step appears and is much larger as she must lead with her foot and cannot use her hands for help. Whit’s strategy on going down stairs was to enlist an adult or sibling. She would stand at the top of the stairs, look at me, and grunt until I came over and gave her my hand for support. Then she felt enough security to take that seemingly larger step down . And she could judge the distance down quite well once she had my hand (see video- Going Down).

Bridging- There are narrower stairs and wide/deeper stairs and whitney would love them all. It was great to find and let her explore all sorts of stairs where she could experiment. We found on the wider/deeper stair steps she went beyond the “get-adult” strategy and figured out she could sit down on the stair and then scouch her butt over the edge and then drop her feet down to the next step to make her way down the stairs without an adult.

Discovering & developing Whit’s story-

It was interesting to see how whitney developed her stair climbing abilities differently then her brother or sister. She learned early that adults are quite useful in helping her get down the stairs and we were more than happy to oblige. However, since that was so successful she really did not want to experiment on how to do it on her own. The other kids were much quicker to figure out how to go down the stairs backwards and to sit down on stairs and scouch their legs down to next step. Whit’s success at enlisting our hand trumped or delayed her finding other methods.