Category: Early Childhood

Language and Memory

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Children increasingly make sense of what they hear by strengthening their auditory perception. Auditory perception skills include the ability to memorize information and the ability to reproduce and act on what was memorized.

Children’s short- and long-term memories develop as they grow up. A preschooler can repeat two to three pieces of information with the number growing up to five pieces by age 7 (Kearns, 2017). Adults have the capacity to retain 7 +/- 2 pieces of information in their short-term memory.

To move the information into long-term memory, children need to develop recall strategies. Many nursery rhymes and children’s songs include steps, lists, and ordered numbers that help children recall accurate information and that allow them to carry out actions.

To develop a repertoire of words and detailed actions, children need to have been exposed to them early in their lives. We can help children develop a repertoire of words by engaging in conversations with and around them when they are alert. By doing so, we help children combine the words, actions, and context into a meaningful outcome.

As parents and educators, should we talk out loud whenever possible throughout the day around our young children? If the self-talk covers different topics and introduces the child to hundreds of words, then the answer is YES.

Around the world, parents communicate with children in different ways. The number of adults taking care of the child varies and could include one or more primary caregiver. In some cultures, older siblings participate in caring for the child as well. As a result, the language input is diverse and it is not surprising that the children grow up displaying different linguistic communication patterns depending on whom they are addressing than children with fewer verbal interactions.

More research is needed to understand how the relationship between memory and language development unfolds in different contexts. We constantly witness children defying the current memory capacity when applied to language development. How far can the “piece of information” captured by children’s short- and long-term memories be stretched? Is “the piece of information” one letter, one chunk, one poem, or one storybook?  It depends on how educators and parents complement the child’s genetic dispositions.

Educators and parents have a responsibility to help children succeed in a global world. Surrounding children with a rich language input is one main success strategy.

Reference:

Kearns, K. (2017). Birth to big school (4th ed.). Victoria, Australia: Cengage Learning.

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How can we help the child’s brain?

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The growth of the human brain is at its highest in the first five years of age. At birth, the brain is about 25% of the size of adult brain and, by 4 years old, it reaches 90% of the adult brain. This fact alone makes the first five years of age very important in a person’s lifespan.

Information is transmitted to the nervous system and to the rest of the body through grey nerve cells called neurons. We are born with 100 to 200 billion neurons with each neuron comprising of approximately 30,000 cells (Johnson, 2003, as cited in Garvis et al., 2019).

Neurons transmit and receive information through their endings called synapses. We are born with 2500 synapses per neuron. However, this number increases to 15000 per neuron by age 3. As we grow up, the brain eliminates the neurons and the synapses that are not used.

The elimination is a natural part of development as long as it is not due to an imbalance in stimulation. Connections thrive through rich visual, auditory, or emotional stimuli. According to Graham (2001, 2011), the process unfolds as follows:

Visual stimulation: Vision can be stimulated by exposing the child to different colors, contrasts, and levels of brightness. Problems in vision that are left unattended might cause the eye to lose its connection to the brain.

Emotional stimulation: Children develop feelings of calm, relaxation, tension, and distress early in their lives. The brain wave patterns function better when positive emotions are triggered. Unresponsive relationships with the child can negatively impact the brain’s development.

Language simulation: Infants are programmed to focus on sounds and especially the human voice. Engaging with the child verbally using different tones and maintaining eye contact helps the child register the words and the context in which they are used.

Movement stimulation: Children need to be given opportunities to develop their large as well as their fine motor skills and their eye hand coordination. Experimentation with movement registers in the brain and movements get more refined as the child grows up.

Restraining children hurts their development and makes it harder for them to grow abilities in all areas of development as their peers. On the other hand, a positive environment supports children’s brain development and widen their opportunities to succeed to in a global world.

References:

Garvis, S., Phillipson, S., Clarke, S., Harrison, L., McCormack, J., & Pendergast, D. (2019). Child development and learning. Victoria, Australia: Oxford University Press.

Graham, J. (2001, 2011). Bulletin #4356, Children and brain development: What we know about how children learn. Retrieved from The University of Maine Cooperative Extension Website: https://extension.umaine.edu/publications/4356e/

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Hand Washing for Children and Adults: When and How

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Hand washing is important for preventing communicable and infectious diseases. Parents, educators, and children should regularly wash their hands.

In a childcare, educators (most situations apply to parents as well) and children should wash their hands as follows:

  • Upon arrival to the childcare and before leaving,
  • Before and after handling food,
  • After blowing own nose or wiping a child’s nose,
  • After using the restroom,
  • After changing nappies,
  • After cleaning up, handling art materials, or collecting garbage,
  • After playing outdoors with sand or touching animals, and
  • Before and after administering medications.

(Marotz, 2015; National Health and Medical Research Council, 2013)

In addition, Marotz (2015) indicates that when handling food, hands should be washed as follows:

  • Before touching food,
  • Before wearing and after disposing of gloves,
  • After handling raw meat, poultry, seafood, or eggs,
  • After touching dirty dishes or garbage,
  • After coughing, sneezing, or blowing own nose,
  • After using tobacco, eating, or drinking,
  • After touching hair or skin such as ears, nose, or arms.

Washing procedure:

Washing thoroughly with soap and water remains the recommended method. Although alcohol-based gels are increasingly gaining popularity, they should not substitute hand washing. Alcohol-based gels could be applied when hands are not very dirty and the rubbing of the hands should continue until the hands are dry.

When rubbing hands and wrist with water and soap, the friction breaks down the germs. The rubbing should continue for 15 to 20 seconds. It is better to wet hands before applying soap, so the hands don’t get dry by repeated washing.

In the case of infants and toddlers, it is important to disinfect the floor and play areas until they develop an understanding of diseases and illnesses. The baby’s hands should be washed after crawling on the floor and before eating or sucking fingers.

How can we help children remember to wash their hands?

  • Educators and parents could post the steps in the bathroom in pictures.
  • Children could be taught a song that gets attached to hand washing.
  • Parents and educators should model washing hands and verbalize what they are doing.
  • Educators could include activities where children role play the correct procedure for hand washing.
  • Educators should communicate the importance of hand washing to parents so children listen to the same message at home and in the childcare.
  • Washing hands should be a fixed daily routine; otherwise, it is going to be difficult to implement consistently.

To build the concept of hygienic procedures for children, parents and educators could start by alerting children to wash hands before eating and to not touch eyes, ears, nose, or mouth while playing as those areas are the most common means for the spread of communicable and infectious diseases.

Hand washing should be part of an overall wellness program that highlights health promotion as a priority for children and adults. In a globally connected world, it becomes important to practise hand hygiene along with other preventive health measures.

References:

Marotz, L. R. (2015). Health, safety, and nutrition for the young child (9th ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.

National Health and Medical Research Council. (2013). Staying healthy: Preventing infectious diseases in early childhood education and care services (9th ed.). Retrieved from https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/about-us/publications/staying-healthy-preventing-infectious-diseases-early-childhood-education-and-care-services

 

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How can educators help children cope with stress?

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Children can get stressed for many reasons. Early childhood settings have an important role to play in alleviating children’s stress.

Firstly, a quality early childhood program provides children with:

  • A balanced environment with vigorous and quiet activities,
  • An engaging curriculum that addresses the needs of the individual children, and
  • Qualified staff members that act in consistent and predictable ways.

Secondly, adults should interact with stressed children and help them develop coping skills. When a child is angry or upset, it is important for the educator to acknowledge the child’s feelings and to allow the child time to process the negative emotions. The child should not be asked to get going with daily activities without having worked through the stressful issues.

Educators need to say something that they think captures the child’s feelings. They need to get down to the child’s level, have eye to eye contact with the child and, for example, say: “I understand that you are upset because of ….”.

It is important to state what the issue could be especially if the child is not the verbal type. The educator should give the child time to calm down and then take one of two approaches: either ask the child to come up with the next step depending on the age and maturity of the child; or, suggest couple options that the child can do to overcome the stress.

Sometimes holding children gently helps them calm down; at other times, children need to be left alone while being supervised. They could read a book or listen to some music.

If children can verbalize feelings, they should be given the time to do so. The educator acknowledges the feelings and helps the child move to the next step on how to cope with the situation.

Thirdly, the educator can help children deal with their emotions by sharing children’s literature that focused on the same stressful issues. There are children’s books that cover the issues of loss and death, diverse families, fears, illness, and hospitalization.

There are many advantages to using children’s books. Children become aware of other children who are going through the same situation and how they navigated the associated stress. It is also useful for all children to learn about difficult life issues through children’s books even if they’re not going through it themselves so they will be equipped to cope when such time comes. In addition, the awareness of stressful issues though literature helps children develop empathy towards children going through tough times.

Fourthly, children can be encouraged to relax. Simple exercises could involve asking the children to tense each muscle then relax it. Another technique could be the use of imagery. For example, children could pretend they are leaves falling from a tree.

Lastly, role play and sociodramatic play offer valuable venues for children to express their feelings and relive their fears and anxieties in a healthy manner. Children often repeat the same scenarios until they are ready to overcome them.

The sooner children learn how to cope with stress, the more prepared they will be to navigate through complex issues as they grow up in a global world.

Reference:

Essa, E. L. (2014). Introduction to early childhood education (7th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

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The Development of Grammar in Young Children

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Once children learn few words, they start to use those words to communicate their needs. Children between the ages of 12 and 18 months use holophrases, which characterizes a word combined with a gesture or vocal intonation, to convey a meaningful sentence. For example, a child says “water?” to ask for a drink of water.

Next, children put two or three words together. This process takes place between the first and second year of age.

In the first stage of grammar development, sentences include nouns, verbs, and adjectives with no attention to grammar rules. The sentences are closer to a telegraphic speech. For example, children don’t add an “s” to words to make them plural. The words can be an agent (who), object, possession, location, attribute, nomination, or recurrence (more). The verbs that describe actions come later. The expressions vary and there is no specific progression for when they are used.

At around two years, children can use 4 and 5 words in a sentence. The number almost doubles by 30 months. On average, girls use longer sentences than boys.

The more vocabulary the child knows, the more they use grammar rules to construct those words in meaningful sentences. For example, they start using plurals, tenses, and verbs. Children add “ing”, “on”, “in”, “s”, “ed”, “a”, and “the” to their sentences.

Three to four year old children use the “wh” questions and the negatives (not, no). They practise and correct themselves until the full sentence is accurate. The same applies to the use of “ed” to verbs in the past tense. At first, the children overregularize where “ed” is also applied to irregular verbs.

As children grow older, they continue to refine their language. Adults have the responsibility to reinforce children’s expressions by giving them time to self-correct without shaming them. Communication through language is necessary to succeed in a global world. Using more than one language and making mistakes are an inherent part of the process.

Reference:
Boyd, D., & Bee, H. (2012). The developing child (13th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

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Reading Strategies in Early Childhood

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To read accurately, children need to realize that spoken words and print are related. The print could reflect ideas, feelings, or even simple words such as “a”, “the”, “in”.

Key reading strategies that help children succeed are as follows:

– The use of effective texts: Children are attracted to books that include pieces of information joined by a theme or a story. Children who listened to stories very early in their lives understand that a story has characters, a plot, and a conclusion. Parents, older siblings, or caregivers could read to the child.

– The exposure to big books: Educators using largely sized books in a shared reading setting can point out to the words as they are being read. This technique helps the child link words to letters and start recognizing common words.

– Provision of many readings of the same book: Reading a book in multiple techniques helps children get the most out of the experience. Parents and educators can read the book to the children the first time without interruptions then read it later while asking about the meaning and shape of the words.

– Presence of print in the environment: Parents and educators could set an example by using print throughout the day. Making shopping lists, labeling items, pointing out road signs, spelling shops’ names, or reading a brand name on a food box are all examples that the child can imitate willingly. In addition, children can be encouraged to express their interests in writing regardless of the accuracy of the letters.

– Diversification of texts: Parents and educators can introduce nursery rhymes, songs, or poems in writing as well as orally. Children will memorize songs that they like and can later see each word in print.

– Reading books independently: Children should be encouraged to choose a book that they would like to listen to or to read themselves. If the book is at the child’s level of reading ability, they should be given time to try to read it on their own then to check with the parent or educator when they are ready to share. In this manner, they could discuss the words that are difficult. They can also read the book to a group of children if they wish to do so.

Ultimately, the practice of independent reading will help children develop reading proficiency and independent learning. Both skills are very valuable for future success in a global world.

Reference:
Fields, M. V., Growth, L. A., & Spangler, K. L. (2008). Let’s begin reading right: A developmental approach to emergent literacy (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

 

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Social and Academic Languages in Early Childhood Education

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Children are vocal but not all talk leads to success. When children talk with each other during play, they vocalise their thoughts. A complex play situation is associated with a similarly complex thinking process. To reach higher levels of language and cognition, children need to extend their repertoire of experiences from the familiar to the unfamiliar.

There are two types of languages, the social and the academic. They have different features with regards to context, cognitive demand, and required language as follows:
1- Context: While the social language focuses on familiar topics from the immediate environment, the academic language helps interpret unfamiliar subjects that are not within the immediate circle of the child.
2- The cognitive demand: The social language is based on what is concrete and personal while the academic language extends to abstract learning.
3- Language used: The social language relies on everyday familiar words that are understood in the immediate environment of the child. The academic language, on the other hand, can capture a diverse audience and be technical.

Educators play an important role in the future linguistic trajectory of children as the academic language can be enhanced by the type of questions that educators ask during daily activities.

Blank (as cited in Fellowes & Oakley, 2014) developed four levels of talk that tap into increasing levels of cognition.
• The first level is “Matching” where children are asked to respond to information by describing, observing, or touching something in front of them.
• The second level is “Selective Analysis” where children respond by focusing on specific information or categories presented to them.
• The third level is “Reordering Perception” where children need to predict an outcome or a solution based on the presented information.
• The fourth level is “Reasoning” where children have to respond to “What if” questions. They need to draw from the text and their personal experiences to justify their answers. The answer is not directly provided to them.

Educators who do not help children travel the path from the social to the academic language are failing those children. Children need to succeed in a global world full of complex layers where higher levels of language and cognition will be extremely helpful to achieve success.

Reference:
Fellowes, J. & Oakley, G. (2014). Language, literacy and early childhood education (2nd ed.). South Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press.

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Phonics in Early Childhood Education

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It is important for children to decode letters in order to read and write correctly. One of the methods of teaching reading is through phonics where sound-letter relationships are used for word recognition.

It is recommended to teach children phonics systematically at about five years of age. This approximation works for most children although some children will be ready much earlier and others would still need additional time prior to engaging with phonics.

“Phonics” teaching should be:
• Enjoyable.
• Systematic.
• Included in daily activities.
• Monitored.
• Taught in context.

Children will remember the letters better when they are included in a story and where words have meanings relevant to the main text.

Examples of approaches to teaching phonics include:

1- Focusing on common phonograms such as “ack”, “ight”, “out”, “ine”, “ing” and then adding a letter to them in order to highlight word families. The educator introduces the letters and sounds them in an intentional manner.

2- Analysing words during shared reading. This is a whole-to-part approach where children learn the word first and then decode the letters that form that word. Children who have a wide exposure to books and texts are able to analyse the letters better than children with little exposure to readings.

3- Asking the children to make the sound of each letter as they are forming words.
Combining the above approaches and monitoring what works best for each child help educators develop a sequence for learning where all children can succeed.

Reference:
Fellowes, J. & Oakley, G. (2014). Language, literacy and early childhood education (2nd ed.). South Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press.

 

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Digital technologies and children: Guidelines for use 给儿童的数字技术使用大纲

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全世界的儿童都在使用数字技术。澳洲幼儿协会颁布了关于年幼儿童使用数字技术的声明。其主要观点认为家长和教育者需要做到以下内容:

1.帮助孩子和同伴在集体活动中使用数字技术。数字技术的使用不应成为孤立的体验。

2.鼓励孩子在使用数字技术时注意休息，参与活跃的体育活动，放松双眼。

3.帮孩子养成睡眠常规，注意睡眠期间不接触数字技术。

4.帮助孩子形成网络安全意识，并就网络环境中哪些信息可以共享有所认识。

5.当孩子受到陌生人的邀请时，引导孩子学习如何寻求帮助。

6.选择那些儿童年龄适宜和发展适宜的游戏、应用和内容。

7.和孩子一起讨论他们网络活动的本质，并且始终关注自我保护问题。

欲了解更多信息，请查Statement on young children and digital technologies.

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E-Safety for young children using the Internet 年幼儿童网络使用安全

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3-7岁儿童几乎不懂那些搜索引擎用以吸引用户和推销商品的策略。更重要的是，他们还不能意识到与网络使用或泄露个人信息相关的风险。
家长需要在孩子还很小的时候就为他们建立网络使用规则，从而抵消这些风险。以下建议来自https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents。
1.严格限制数字设备的使用时间。
2.对于儿童发展适宜的电脑应用特点进行自我教育。
3.监控所有家庭成员的网络使用情况，并让孩子知道这一点。
4.监督孩子在上网时可接触到的信息。
5.和孩子一起玩网络游戏。与孩子共享兴趣有助于建立亲子间的信任感，有助于亲子能长久地就网络安全问题进行讨论。
6.熟悉电脑应用的规则，禁止聊天功能和摄像功能。
7.保存对于孩子来说年龄适宜的电脑应用，限制那些年龄不适宜的电脑应用。
8.确保孩子不会因为操作失误而在网上购买产品或服务。
9，越早与孩子讨论可接受的上网行为越好。告诉孩子可以与成人谈论他们在网上的所见所闻，尤其是一些让他们感觉恼怒、烦扰或者不舒服的事情。
10.用餐时间不要使用数字设备，避免牺牲与家庭成员的互动交往。
11.确保睡前不要使用数字设备，确保孩子在夜晚接触不到数字设备。

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