Ester Carvalho
The cognitive benefits of play: Effects on the learning brain. © 2008 - 2014, Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved Science supports many of our intuitions about the benefits of play. Playful behavior appears to have positive effects on the brain and on a child’s ability to learn. In fact, play may function as an important, if not crucial, mode for learning. Want specifics? Here are some examples. Animal experiments: Play improves memory and stimulates the growth of the cerebral cortex In 1964, Marion Diamond and her colleagues published an exciting paper about brain growth in rats. When researchers examined the rats’ brains, they discovered that the “enriched" rats had thicker cerebral cortices than did the “impoverished" rats (Diamond et al 1964).
Subsequent research confirmed the results—rats raised stimulating environments had bigger brains. They were smarter, too--able to find their way through mazes more quickly (Greenough and Black 1992). Do these benefits of play extend to humans? How long should recess be? Language and the benefits of play 1. 2. The magic of child-directed play. Finding the child-parent play balance. Play to Learn: Discussion | Teachers TV. The cognitive benefits of play: Effects on the learning brain. Why play-based learning? (free article) - Early Childhood Australia. Different types play. Importance of play for babies & children. Play is more than just fun for babies and children. It’s how they learn best, and how they work out who they are, how the world works and where they fit into it.
You can read this article in a selection of languages other than English. The importance of play Playing is one of the most important things you can do with your child, because play is essential for your child’s brain development. The time you spend playing together gives your child lots of different ways and times to learn. Play also helps your child: build confidence feel loved, happy and safe develop social skills, language and communication learn about caring for others and the environment develop physical skills.
Your child will love playing with you, but sometimes she might prefer to play by herself and won’t need so much hands-on play from you. Different types of play Unstructured, free play is the best type of play for young children. This is play that just happens, depending on what takes your child’s interest at the time. How young children learn English through play. As we release Learning Time with Timmy – our first app for early-years learners of English – Danitza Villarroel, a teacher on our Learning Time with Shaun and Timmy course in Chile, explains the importance of learning through play, and offers a few tips for teachers new to this age group.
Teaching English to pre-school children can be daunting for teachers new to this age group. Young children have shorter attention spans than older children and adults, and they're still learning their mother tongue. But teaching these learners can be enormously rewarding once you've taken a few basic principles on board. The importance of active learning Active learning means fully involving children in the learning process. To achieve this, we need to provide environments that appeal to all their senses, including visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and tactile. Promoting learning through play Play is a very significant part of what life means to children at this stage of their development. Play • ZERO TO THREE.
Children need time to play. How can I help my child to start talking? (Video) Health visitor Sara Patience describes how you can help develop your child's language skills by talking and playing with her. Show transcript Hide transcript How can I help my child to start talking? Sara: “You want this one? Between 12 months and two-and-a-half years, there is a lot of language development, and you will hear your child start to use more and more words. Why does my toddler love repetition? Paediatric speech and language therapist.
It may test your patience when your toddler demands 'Row, row, row your boat' for the 10th time. But there's a good reason for her insistence. Toddlers love repetition because it helps them to learn, and because it's familiar and comforting. From around the age of two, you will notice your toddler repeating the same words and phrases constantly. By the time she's three, she will also demand her favourite stories and nursery rhymes over and over again. Through repeating things, your toddler is able to take in new information each time. This is why if you allow your toddler to choose the bedtime book you read to her, nine times out of 10 she will choose the same one night after night! And she will love stories and nursery rhymes with repeated phrases, because she can join in. A small study has found that repetition of stories may help children to learn new words.
Repetition is also comforting for your toddler. Last reviewed: November 2012. Let's Talk. What do babies need in order to learn and thrive? One thing they need is conversation — responsive, back-and-forth communication with their parents and caregivers. This interactive engagement is like food for their developing brains, nurturing language acquisition, early literacy, school readiness, and social and emotional well-being. A dispiriting number of children don’t get that kind of brain-fueling communication, research suggests. In early childhood policy (and in the wider media), much attention has been paid to the so-called word gap — findings that show that low-income children hear 30 million fewer words, on average, and have less than half the vocabulary of upper-income peers by age three. But putting that alarming number in the spotlight obscures a more critical component of the research, says Harvard Graduate School of Education literacy expert Meredith Rowe: it’s not so much the quantity of words but the quality of the talk that matters most to a child’s development.
The Woman Who Changed Her Brain: Barbara Arrowsmith-Young at TEDxToronto. Deb Roy: The birth of a word. How do you speak 'Motherese'? How young children learn English as another language. By Opal Dunn, educational consultant and author Introduction Young children are natural language acquirers; they are self-motivated to pick up language without conscious learning, unlike adolescents and adults.
They have the ability to imitate pronunciation and work out the rules for themselves. Any idea that learning to talk in English is difficult does not occur to them unless it’s suggested by adults, who themselves probably learned English academically at a later age through grammar-based text books. Read the notes below about young children learning English as another language. You can also download these notes as a booklet. Right-click on the link below to download the booklet to your computer. The advantages of beginning early Young children are still using their individual, innate language-learning strategies to acquire their home language and soon find they can also use these strategies to pick up English. Stages in picking up English Understanding Frustration Mistakes Reading. Alison Gopnik: What do babies think? Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies.
What Parents Can Gain From Learning the Science of Talking to Kids | MindShift | KQED News. The widening education gap between the rich and the poor is not news to those who work in education, many of whom have been struggling to close the gap beginning the day poor children enter kindergarten or preschool. But one unlikely soldier has joined the fight: a pediatric surgeon who wants to get started way before kindergarten. She wants to start closing the gap the day babies are born. When Dr. Dana Suskind began doing cochlear implants on infants at the University of Chicago—a cutting-edge surgical technique that allows once-deaf babies to hear—in her follow-ups with families she noticed a stark difference in how the now-hearing children acquired language. Once they could hear, some children’s language skills thrived and grew, while others languished.
The difference turned out to be the words children heard from their parents and caregivers, millions of them. For Suskind, a lightbulb went on. Bringing Parents On Board Of course, some words are more powerful than others. . * Tune In.