#learning readiness

[smartstartdaycareinc]

Ready for School: Tips to Prepare for Kindergarten

Engaging in group activities through daycare services can be a great way to foster social development in Illinois.

Getting your child ready for kindergarten is an exciting milestone that sets the foundation for their future learning journey. To make this transition smoother, here are some essential tips for parents to consider.

[suzannecresswell-blog]

Fun Ways to Improve Your Child’s Learning Readiness

With the summer upon us and our annual resolution for self‑improvement in hand, ask any parent or teacher and their goal is to “do better”.

Parents and educators both ask, “What’s going on with our children?” and “What does it look like to do better?”

As parents, we want to turn over a fresh leaf and support our children in moving toward independence in their day-to-day activities. Educators also hope to take a fresh look at their next year’s classrooms and aim to motivate and develop independence in learning styles.

Can your unique learner improve his or her learning skills, even though school is out for the summer? Yes! In fact, summer provides an ideal opportunity to work on these foundational skills. Without the daily stress of reading, writing and mathematics, you can improve your child’s learning readiness in ways that feel like play. We need to use a different metric when considering their progress.

Keep your expectations for yourself and your child simple. But, by all means, do have expectations and goals to help your child build on learning skills in a non‑academic and non‑competitive home environment.

Our children, and especially our children who are unique learners, need to be better understood. These students may be low in some foundational abilities and need to learn to assimilate the information around them, recognize patterns, and consider alternative explanations before selecting the most likely. This type of problem‑solving not only needs to occur when performing reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also on the playground and when driving home from school with siblings.

Try One More Time

The first area on which to focus is improving your unique learner’s ability to implement “try one more time” strategies. Start by stretching your child’s attention span by having them “hang in there” a little longer. Play with that toy a little longer, work on solving that difficult puzzle just a moment longer, read a little longer, and encourage them to “stick with” that chore you assigned them, just a little longer.

Make this goal of yours, designed to help your child, a secret. Without talking about it, start role modeling this behavior yourself and when you’re playing together. If you’re playing a game with toy cars, stretch out the game a little longer by adding a new and creative dimension. Perhaps enjoy having the toys convoy to a pretend parking lot at the pretend zoo. If your child is reading a story, have him or her look at the pictures just a little longer. Ask your child to describe all the things that are red in the picture or all the things that make a sound. Play card games, even a second time around. Invent a new way of playing with the backyard bowling set and teach your child to stretch their imagination.

Teaching your child to stretch their imagination to play longer will help improve attention span for back to school days. Teaching your child to “hang in there”, problem‑solve and execute one more attempt at finding the lost sock, attaching that bicycle wheel back onto the bike frame, figuring out the best solution to the riddle of the day, and finishing the chore independently can all help keep the mind engaged in a productive manner.

Help your child to enjoy feeling their mind successfully wrap around a predicament. Look for opportunities for your child to “think a little more” or “try one more time”. Encourage and support the effort.

Sometimes, you may need to be a part of the solution. Try to help your child feel the pleasant experience of overcoming an obstacle, even if the suggestions and solution came from you.

We want children to enjoy using their minds and develop “try one more time…” strategies. They will need them when they head back to school as well as for the rest of their lives.

Improve Spatial Awareness

Second, every child must have an innate, internalized, automatic sense of the physical world. In other words, they need to understand three‑dimensional space and be able to navigate their physical body in, over, under, through, around, and to explore all physical spatial relationships.

Navigating space seems simple to us because with just a quick glance, we can easily see how to navigate to the restroom in a busy and unfamiliar restaurant. The visual sense of space develops after experiencing it physically. We may not remember learning this skill, but learn it we surely did.

Our children need to learn this skill too. They must learn the words to describe physical space and be able to separate themselves from that space. The ability to separate themselves then allows them to learn to observe the objects, people, places, and things that are in the space around them. This in turn develops into the ability to visually judge space without having to physically move around the room.

When we talk about physically experiencing the world around us, we are really talking about the sensory system that perceives movement in relationship to the space around us. This sensory system, the vestibular system, perceives the gravitational pull of the earth’s surface and creates an innate drive for balance. This drive informs the muscle and joint system that has its own set of receptors, called proprioceptors, that allow the body to smoothly respond to different shifts in the center of gravity.

We correct our balance while riding a bicycle by a small action of a specific muscle and joint system, the proprioceptive system. Sometimes, just tilting the head to the side is sufficient in overcoming any slight loss of balance when cycling around a curve. Activities such as cycling require the integration of the vestibular system with the proprioceptive system. (Learn about the vestibular and proprioceptive systems HERE.)

If these two systems aren’t functioning properly, the brain will struggle to learn. They are foundational to learning as well as a sense of emotional and physical security.

The vestibular system needs exercising and the proprioceptive system needs exercising, because the vestibular system and the proprioceptive systems are fuel for the brain. This information can provide a world of understanding in providing the most effective support for children who are unique learners.

The vestibular system provides an overall sense of calm and of emotional security and may explain why taking a walk is so pleasant. Movement, exercise, sports, martial arts, yoga, dancing, and juggling all offer excellent opportunities for the movement system to stimulate and help facilitate brain functioning.

Why do you enjoy yoga so much?  It’s because you’re continually challenging your center of gravity with the gravitational pull around you. Accomplishing this and successfully balancing is associated with a positive emotional response.

Often unique learners’ performance is judged according to a standard metric of speed of performance and accuracy of responses. However, now that you understand how foundational the vestibular and proprioceptive systems are to learning readiness, you can support your unique learner’s growth by embedding movement as a part of the fuel necessary to grow the brain.

The unique learner who has difficulty sequencing, reasoning, and independently problem‑solving literally needs physical movement (often more beneficial than added homework) in order to facilitate effective thinking.

A more typical student may seem to respond well to practice, practice, practice. A unique learner seems to respond better to practice, movement, practice, movement.

Now you understand your unique learner better. Your resolution to do better is already achieved because doing better, for these children, requires a better understanding of their actions. So rather than focusing on more “homework” type worksheets, use this new knowledge during the slower days of summer and you will find your unique learner has greatly improved their learning readiness when school resumes.

(Be sure to check out the exercises for the vestibular and proprioceptive systems HERE.)