How can parents and teachers best educate young children? What principles can both teachers and parents bring to the education of very young children? Gillian Craig, who was part of the Learning Time with Shaun and Timmy writing team, explains. As teachers and parents, we follow certain principles in our roles. Often though, these principles overlap and all we need to do is recognise and reinforce these areas. Ask (the right) questions When my daughter came out of her class one day shortly after her course started, I asked her, 'What did you do in class today?
'. Carol Dweck: The power of believing that you can improve. Getting the right balance between adult-led and child-initiated learning. 6 Types of Play: How Children's Play Becomes More Social. Play is a serious business.
The pioneering developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky thought that, in the preschool years, play is the leading source of development. Heuristic play. Heuristic play is rooted in young children’s natural curiosity.
As babies grow, they move beyond being content to simply feel and ponder objects, to wanting to find out what can be done with them. Toddlers have an urge to handle things: to gather, fill, dump, stack, knock down, select and manipulate in other ways. Household or kitchen utensils offer this kind of activity as every parent knows, and can occupy a child for surprising stretches of time. When toddlers make an enjoyable discovery – for instance when one item fits into another, or an interesting sound is produced – they often repeat the action several times to test the result, which strengthens cognitive development as well as fine muscle control and hand/eye coordination. In their book, People under Three, Elinor Goldschmied and Sonia Jackson coined the term heuristic play, to explain how to provide a more structured opportunity for this kind of activity. Heuristic play with objects is not a novel idea.
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. The magic of child-directed play. Finding the child-parent play balance.
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. 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. ZERO TO THREE. What Parents Can Gain From Learning the Science of Talking to Kids. 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. Patricia Kuhl: The linguistic genius of babies. Alison Gopnik: What do babies think? 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. The advantages of beginning early. Enhancing the Language Development of Young Children. When we first brought our daughter home from the hospital I was inexperienced.
How can young children best learn languages? The British Council's Tracey Chapelton explains how parents of young children can lay the foundations for success. Children's brains are highly active Your child is unique, but what all children have in common is natural curiosity and an innate ability to learn. Kuhl states that babies and young children are geniuses at acquiring a second language. 'Babies', she says, 'can discriminate all the sounds of all languages... and that's remarkable because you and I can't do that.
We're culture-bound listeners. How do you speak 'Motherese'? Deb Roy: The birth of a word. Listen to Your Mother. Young children face a remarkable challenge in learning to use the language of their culture. Toddlers vary widely, however, in the rate at which they learn new words.1 A team of Harvard Graduate School of Education researchers set out to ask whether and how children's language environment can impact vocabulary development. In their study of mother-child pairs from low-income families, they found that mothers who used many different words (not just many words) had toddlers with faster growth in vocabulary use.
During the toddler and preschool years, most children learn to use hundreds of words, combining them into sentences and engaging in conversation with others. From previous research, we know that variation in vocabulary growth relates to child characteristics like gender, and also to parental factors. What did they find?
1Huttenlocher, J., Haight, W., Bryk, A., Seltzer, M., & Lyons, T. (1991). 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.
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. 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.
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