A Guide for Early Primary Education. Because the domains are interrelated, curriculum planning is critical to help young children make meaningful connections across domains and across related subject-matter disciplines. Development occurs in a relatively orderly sequence, with later abilities, skills, and knowledge building on those already acquired. Development proceeds at varying rates from child to child as well as unevenly within different areas of each child's functioning. Each child is unique, with an individual pattern and timing of growth and an individual personality, temperament, learning style, and family and life experiences.
Age is only a crude index of developmental maturity.
Recognition that individual variation is expected and valued requires that educators, while having high expectations and standards for all children, be flexible in the ways in which students reach these expectations. For example, when children have or do not have early literacy experiences, such as being read to regularly, their later success in learning to read is affected accordingly. Development proceeds in predictable directions toward greater complexity, organization, and internalization. The earliest form of symbolic representation in childhood is play, which begins at about eighteen months of age and becomes increasingly complex through the primary years. Development and learning occur in and are influenced by multiple social and cultural contexts.