SAN DIEGO -- Registered nurse, Dianne Bourque, sets down a small bottle with a Cheerio inside in front of a 17-month old boy. They are sitting on the living room floor in the boy's foster home. When she gets his attention, Bourque asks the little boy to remove the Cheerio from the bottle, and then sits back to watch him try.

It's a simple task, one that can help Bourque better understand the boy's mental and physical development. The task is part of the Denver Developmental Screening Test, which looks at: personal and social skills; language skills; and fine and gross motor skills.

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See How Foster Children Benefit From Developmental Program

"Fine motor are the smaller muscles, like the eye movement and picking up small items, scribbling, holding a pencil," Bourque said.

"And then the larger items -- gross motor -- are his mobility. Is he crawling, walking, kicking a ball? Things like that," she said.

Mary Livingston agreed to have her foster son tested because she was already concerned about his development.

"When we first got him as a foster child he was 4 months old. And I knew he was behind," Livingston said.

10News cannot identify the boy, because he is a minor. But Livingston did tell us he is hard of hearing, and has problems with his speech and motor skills.

Livingston's son is not alone. Many foster children enter the system with developmental problems that have gone undiagnosed.

That's why Children's Hospital teamed up with the San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency, the Child Abuse Prevention Foundation, and The First 5 Commission of San Diego to provide free developmental screening to foster children.

"We know that children in the foster care system have had histories of abuse or neglect. And we know this abuse or neglect can impact their ability to learn and grow and develop," said Jean Gordon, Program Director of the Developmental Screening and Enhancement Program, or DSEP, at Children's Hospital.

"A big priority of ours is really to provide that support and education on how to access services, as well as provide the foster parent with information on how that child's developing," she said.

DSEP also shares the test results with the child's social worker, and with the county. That way, if the child is removed from one foster home, and placed in another, the new parents will have the information they need to raise a healthy child.

Mary Livingston already had her son tested once, when he was just a few months old. She said it made a huge difference in her foster son's life.

"It let us know which areas to work on, which areas to pursue such as physical therapy for his fine and motor skills, such as occupational therapy to help him work with his hands to feed himself," Livingston said.

She said her hope is that through continued therapy, her foster son will continue to progress. Then, when it is time to start kindergarten, she says, "he may be a little behind, but at least he'll be doing his best."