There are four milestones these being 0 – 3 years, 3 – 7 years, 7 – 12 years and 12 – 19 years. They mark the achievement of certain mental and physical abilities such as walking or being able to form a sentence and signal the end of one developmental period and the beginning of another.
Physical developments include movement skills, gross motor skills, fine motor skills and eye hand co-ordination.
Physical Development – Ages 0 – 3 years
By 6 months a child can turn their head towards sounds and movements, they watch an adult’s face when feeding, smile at familiar faces and voices, reach up and hold feet when lying on their backs, they can look and reach for objects, hold and shake a rattle and they like to put everything in their mouths.
Between 6 months and 1 year a child can move from sitting with support to sitting alone they can roll over from their tummy to back. They begin to creep, crawl or shuffle on their bottom. They can pull or push against adult hands or furniture to reach a standing position. They can raise arms to be lifted. They respond by turning or looking when they hear their name. They enjoy patting and poking objects whilst playing, pass objects from hand to hand, look for things that have been hidden or dropped, and reaches hand towards source of food.
Between the ages of one to two years they begin to walk, sit alone indefinitely, feed themselves, push and pull on toys while walking, wave goodbye, point or make noises to indicate their wants, wave goodbye, point or make noises to indicate wants. They enjoy a picture book, shake head for ‘NO’, uses thumb and first two fingers to grip, they like to bang objects together, crawl upstairs, stoops to pick things up from the floor, begins to show preferences for one hand, build tower of few bricks.