One activity used in several child development classes is to hand out automated babies. Students are usually paired off into male and female couples (though some classes will do same sex pairings), and each couple is given an automated doll. It looks like a normal baby doll, but there are a variety of sensors in the doll. These sensors record how well the baby is handled, how often it's fed, and how long the "parents" let it cry when it does so. All of this data is gathered in a few weeks time, and the students are graded according to their performance.
Another activity is to have a child development lab with children from the community. The students in a child development class assist in running something similar to a daycare center, where the younger children are taught, monitored, and allowed to play. The high school students are assigned certain tasks that they have to accomplish, such as teaching the kids a certain lesson or keeping a journal on the development of a small number of children. Teachers will be present to make sure that nothing goes wrong and to evaluate student performance.
In order to understand how they developed as children, it may be helpful to assign a research project to students. Once they've learned the developmental milestones that they should be looked for in growing children (walking, talking, use of imagination and empathy, etc.), then students should interview their families and ask questions about when they began to develop. This will give the students some idea of how normal their own development was, and it will teach them what to look for in developing children.