Monkey Chatter

Over the first few months of life, your baby’s vision and visual skills will develop and improve quickly, so that by the time they are around 3 months old they’ll be able to focus on colours, shapes and objects. This is the perfect time for them to start attending a baby class such as Monkey Music.

The neurons for vision begin to form very early and babies need stimulating visual experiences in order to exercise their visual skills during the first 6 months of life.

A newborn baby’s vision is limited to being able to focus on something up to eight inches away from them, such as your face as you hold them close in your arms, but as their vision develops is will their distance vision, enabling them to see things at all distances and they’ll start to watch and follow a moving object with their eyes. This is known as tracking and your baby will rely on this key skill to explore objects and faces as well as learning about the world around them.

If you were to shake a toy in front of newborn’s face, they will struggle to watch it, but by 3 to 4 months, their co-ordination and focus in both eyes will have improved to allow them to follow the movement of the toy. From around 4 to 6 months, your baby’s tracking skills will have developed to enable them to  follow objects well in all directions. They will also be able to put together a three-dimensional view of the world by this stage.

Quite early on a young baby will begin to reach out and grasp objets that they see and find attractive. By grasping and reaching, babies are practicing their hand-eye co-ordination and will be developing the ‘wiring’ in their brain and as they get older, you’ll notice their aim and tracking ability starts to improve.

At Monkey Music we support a baby’s visual development by encouraging visual tracking and hand-eye co-ordination by using lots of age appropriate props and hand held percussion instruments which babies are encouraged to pick up, hold and play.

Join us at Monkey Music with your baby and share precious time together as they explore a magical musical world.