school readiness | Integrated Learning Therapy

What are the keys to school readiness?

Feb 14, 2024 | I'm a Parent, I'm a Teacher, ILT Blog

According to the University of Melbourne¹, the bedrock of a child’s educational preparation are hearing, vision and communication. These three play vital roles in a child’s ability to absorb, engage and thrive in the classroom.

Listening: A gateway to learning

Even though a young chld’s hearing may be tested as normal, as they grow, some can develop mild or more serious learning losses. Sometimes children develop “glue ear” following ear infections, a common childhood condition that causes a hearing loss that might be unnoticed even though it can be treated.

Even a mild hearing loss can disrupt learning by interfering with a child’s capacity to understand spoken language clearly, follow instructions, engage in discussions or grasp crucial explanations during lessons. Hearing impairments may not be recognised until the classroom teacher starts to notice delays in learning and behaviours like inattention and difficulty following instructions.

A child with a mild hearing loss with also have to put more effort into listening, which can make youngsters more worn out and irritable.

It is not only what we can hear, but how we can hear important messages against other, competing sounds in the environment. There is growing evidence that the poorer a child’s ability to listen in a noisy environment, the greater the risk of developing literacy delays.

Thorough hearing checks should be part of school preparation.

Vision: Supporting school readiness and positive learning experiences

Most young children are visual learners and it’s estimated that 80% of a young child’s learning occurs through the eyes, making clear and effective vision a cornerstone for positive school learning experiences.

As children advance in their academic journey, increasing demands are placed on their visual system, such as having to read from the board, read books with smaller print and interacting with electronic devices.

Watch closely for signs of vision problems, including sitting too close to the TV, difficulty maintaining their place while reading, holding books close, reluctance to engage in reading and close-up tasks, tilting the head, closing one eye, rubbing the eyes, complaining of headaches and displaying a short attention span.

While these signs may not conclusively indicate a vision problem, it would certainly be wise to have a thorough eye check-up, preferably from a Developmental or Behavioural Optometrist.

Speech and language development: The building blocks of communication

Language—understanding and using words and sentences to express oneself—is the key to our ability to communicate and is critical for the development of reading and writing during the school years.

Children who enter school with a good language foundation often show enhanced reading comprehension, expressive abilities and better overall academic performance.

Helping them develop language includes encouraging language-rich environments at home and in early childhood settings like creches and pre-schools. Read aloud with children, engage in conversations and expose them to diverse vocabulary.

Additionally, early identification and support for children facing language delays or disorders is crucial to help them succeed academically.

Communication is not just about the words you say, but how you say them. By the time a child is ready to start school, their speech should be easily understood by a stranger. You might be able to understand everything your child says (you speak to them every day), but would a new teacher or a new friend understand them?

They might not say every word or every sound perfectly, but can they get their message across? This is so important for a child’s learning, not only in the classroom but on the playground, on the sports field and on weekends.

Research shows that certain speech sound production difficulties are associated with difficulties in literacy (reading and spelling) in the later school years.

A Speech Therapist should be able to help with an assessment if you are concerned.

Of course there are other developmental conditions that can impact on a child’s ability to thrive in school but there is no doubt that our sight, hearing and language are keys to a promising start to school.

¹Provided by Dani Tomlin, Peter Carew, Ruth Braden, Christine Nearchou and Miya St John, University of Melbourne

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When is a child’s brain ready to learn?

Dec 13, 2023 | I'm a Parent, I'm a Teacher, ILT Blog

Our brains are complex and in spite of ongoing research, we are still very ignorant about the way they work. What we do know is that typical school-related tasks need multiple areas of the brain to work together. For example, activities related to language skills (listening, reading, thinking up words, answering a question) involve many separate parts of the brain. These different parts will be linked by networks of brain cells (neurons) that enable them to work together to produce a desired outcome.

If a child’s brain has not developed enough to function in this complex way, learning may be difficult. Such a child may not be learning ready

Learning readiness shouldn’t be confused with school readiness. School readiness may be achieved by many children because they have learned many of the skills required to cope with school. These include having a measure of emotional independence, the ability to get along with same-aged peers, being able to sit still, manipulate pencils, listen to instructions, and so on. It doesn’t mean that these children will all thrive at school. Somewhere along the way, be it in Grade 1 or 2 or 3, children who showed school readiness but were not learning ready will begin to find school more and more challenging.

The brain’s readiness to learn anything quickly, efficiently and joyfully depends on two things, both partially reliant on input from the environment. The first is the growth of the neurons and the second is the formation of connections between the neurons.

A brain cell’s development can be thought of as a young tree. Remember when you planted the tree it had a thin, fragile stem with just a few roots and branches. As it grew, the stem thickened, the root system spread out and the branches sprouted to form a thick overhead canopy.

The thickening of the stem of the neural ‘tree’ happens through a process known as ‘myelination’. Myelin is a fatty substance that insulates the ‘stem’ of the neuron so that electrical messages can be conveyed efficiently from one neuron to the next. Before a neural network is myelinated, messages can easily get lost or scrambled. A diet rich in omega-3 will supply the raw materials needed for good myelin but the regular use of a certain neural network is needed to supply the stimulus to begin the myelination.

Myelin develops from the lower brain areas and gradually moves up to higher levels, reflecting the child’s growing ability. For example, at birth the child is capable of very little. Areas needed for walking, talking and learning are still not myelinated.

The cycles of myelin formation will coincide with a child’s mastery of increasingly complex learning throughout the school years and early adulthood. Sometimes, a child appears to be having a hard time in school then suddenly seems to blossom. Such ‘late bloomers’ show that different brains have a different schedule and not all will be ready to learn at the same age.

The connections between the neurons (which happen at the synapses between the brain cells) are formed at the same time as myelination and depend on the experiences of the child. These are mainly experiences offered through body movements and stimulation through the senses. They give rise to the trillions of cells in various brain areas that are linked in neural networks and which are needed for learning and task completion.

If something has occurred along the child’s development pathway to prevent either myelination or enough connections, he or she may not be learning ready.

At this stage, you have to be careful not to try and force the readiness by the wrong kind of stimulation. Intensive, remedial work can certainly help stimulate development of the networks but may not always be helpful because some aspects of development can’t be forced. Skills that are forced may cause a child to use immature, inappropriate neural networks that will not be able to support later, even more complex tasks. Forcing learning can also cause emotional problems.

A better approach is to revisit the child’s developmental history to find out what brain areas may be underdeveloped and to help the brain ‘catch up’ by using the movements responsible for brain development in the first place. We know how the brain is structured through movement and also what movements are responsible for the development of neural networks. This makes it possible to help the child achieve a state of ‘readiness to learn’ rather than focusing on the weaknesses he or she shows at school.

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Are we teaching our children when they’re ready to learn?

Jun 13, 2023 | I'm a Parent, I'm a Teacher, ILT Blog

“Education is the single most important job of the human race.” —George Lucas

Our education system demands that children have to start school in a certain window of time. The law states that a South African child may start school at the age of five-and-a-half, provided she turns six by June 30 of her Grade One year. A child must start school by the year in which she turns seven. If children seem ready before the prescribed age, they may be denied entrance to school. Others may be forced to begin formal schooling because they meet the age requirements.

How wise is this approach? Are all children exactly the same in terms of learning readiness or interest in learning? Added to this is the fact that in many instances, children are being expected to begin formal learning before Grade 1. Government schools are now teaching reading skills to pre-schoolers even though there is neurodevelopmental evidence to show that its more efficient to teach them to read at an older age. It seems that any advantage from learning to read earlier is cancelled out in later years. Learning to read is a journey that should begin in the earliest years of development, at home, with the family. When schools try to force skills onto children who have not had the appropriate foundations, reading suffers.

An overly crowded curriculum means that young children might struggle to keep up with work that once was designed for higher grade levels. Failure to cope is seen to be the learner’s problem rather a deficiency of the curriculum. The result is that some children are feeling stressed, anxious and inadequate. This is wrong because they don’t have a problem. The problem is that they are not ready to learn what they are being taught.

There are very fundamental skills that need to be in place for a child to meet the demands of Grade 1 and beyond. For example, a child needs to be able to see and reproduce the oblique line in a triangle to recognise and write letters like K and R. They need to have an understanding of numbers to really understand adding and subtracting.

What pre-schoolers need is the freedom to play, albeit it in carefully designed environments. This allows them to develop the basics for those key skills. They don’t need to become proficient in reading and writing.

Brain development makes it easier to learn virtually everything (except foreign languages) as we get older. As adults, perhaps you have looked at your child’s schoolwork and wondered how you, at the same age, found such seemingly simple work as being challenging. Rushing academic teaching may neglect ensuring that basic skills are well embedded in children’s neural networks.

In their book, Stixrud and Johnson (see reference below) relate that one of the ‘most obvious problems we see from rushed academic training is poor pencil grip. Holding a pencil properly is actually pretty difficult. You need to have the fine motor skills to hold the pencil lightly between the tips of the first two fingers and the thumb, to stabilize it, and to move it both horizontally and vertically using only your fingertips. In a preschool class of 20 we know of in which the kids were encouraged to write much too early, 17 needed occupational therapy to correct the workarounds they’d internalized in order to hold a pencil.’

There are always exceptions. Some children are ready to learn and manage school-based tasks at a younger age than others. Some of them go on to starting post-school studies in their early or middle teens. We are, however, concerned with all children and many, especially from our disadvantaged communities, are simply not equipped to deal with accelerated learning practices. Replacing fundamentals with academics won’t help our failing education system.

Reference: The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Child More Control Over Their Lives by William Stixrud, Ph.D., and Ned Johnson, published on February 13, 2018, by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Above image supplied by Freepik