Best Way to Help a 10-Month-Old Baby Learn and Develop Skills

Your baby may now be gaining immense pleasure from all his activities, as well as enjoying having lots of fun with you and other members of the family. His ability to understand language is coming on in leaps and bounds and he’s beginning to make a real effort to communicate with you.

Physical development   

As your baby is now spending more time upright, playtime becomes more fun for him since he is able to see and handle his toys more easily.

Fingers and hands

By now your baby has mastered the pincer grip and is able to grasp things accurately between his thumb and forefinger. Self-feeding, for example, is now much easier, and his finely tuned hand-eye coordination enables him to pick up anything he comes across. This manual dexterity means he can now use toys as they were intended – putting blocks in and out of a box, for example. And he still loves dropping and picking up games – he drops, you pick up!

Visual skills

Since his birth, your baby has been refining his visual skills and now he can judge the size of an object up to one metre (two feet) away. He’ll know, for example, that a ball rolled from this distance will gel larger as it comes towards him. Watch how he holds out his arms to catch it. Ask him to roll it back, and initially he may swing at it with no effect, but eventually he’ll be able to return it in your direction.

Activities to develop skills

•    Now that your baby is becoming more alert and aware of what is going on around him, introduce some indoor equipment such as a large plastic ball and an expanding tunnel. And help him improve his fine motor skills by giving him harmless objects to handle and explore.
•    Your baby may be starting to become aware of the noises animals make, so now is the time to introduce some animal songs into your repertoire. Look at animal books together and let him hear you mimic all the different sounds they make. Once your baby learns to imitate lots of animal noises, his success will encourage him to copy other sounds too.
•    If your baby loves moving objects from one container to another, why not make a surprise box full of interesting and harmless objects for him to handle, explore, put back in and take out again. To make the game more interesting you could wrap some items in paper – he’ll love ripping them open to see what’s hidden inside. Never leave your baby alone if you give him paper to play with as lie may put it in his mouth and choke on it.

•  Satisfy your baby’s need to explore with his hands – and encourage his sense of touch  – with a “touch-and-feel” activity book that contains pictures and shapes made out of different textures.
•    Babies at this age are intrigued by space – they love crawling behind sofas or around the back of chairs. Your baby will probably also love to crawl through a play tunnel. Roll a ball towards him inside the tunnel so that he can see how it works. As he becomes confident, he’ll soon love being chased through the tunnel or hiding from you inside.
•   A daily trip out to the park or local playground is a good chance to spend time together. It also means you can encourage your baby’s sense of spatial awareness, and improve his visual skills as you point things out to him.