If you are a pre-schooler you can have a whirlwind of a social life by attending a plethora of early years activity classes ranging from baby sign, art and crafts, gymnastics, football and even baby disco. Each activity promises to teach your child some essential skills but do they really make a difference a
nd just what are these essential skills?
Eve Wilson, a Qualified Ofsted Inspector and former Headteacher, is the founder of Bright Starters classes for early years language development . Eve believes that activity classes are a vital and essential part of a child’s early development and that they do have a profound affect on the child’s learning with consequent long-term effects. Eve maintains that “Parents are the best asset this country has in terms of education and as a nation we should be promoting more activities that parents can do with their child. We should be supporting preschool activities through which children learn vital language, communication and social skills accompanied by their parent. In this way the parent gains enormous confidence in helping the child, together with insight into how their child learns and knowledge of activities they can follow-up at home. The child learns with the support of the key person in their young lives.’
So what are these essential skills and how do they benefit my child with reading and writing?
Before a child learns to read they need to grasp what teachers call pre-reading skills. These are as follows:
Matching - Reading firstly involves identifying and matching word sounds with word shapes, then letter sounds (phonemes) with letter shapes (graphemes). Both these skills are vital for reading: the first in order to start to read, the second for decoding words, i.e. phonetics. A knowledge of phonetics is essential for developing and advancing a child’s reading ability as it provides one way of attacking unknown words. To be able to use this method, children have to develop good aural abilities (listening skills) and attention skills – music classes are excellent at developing both skills as children learn informally to participate in a group and to learn words of songs.
Rhyming – Research shows that children who understand rhyming words have a head start in learning to read and, even more, to spell. Why? - rhyming is a particularly useful skill as it is the basis of another decoding technique used in schools, known as onset and rime (yes it really is spelt that way in this context!). These are terms used to describe the units of a word. For instance the word ‘cake’ would be made up of “c” and “ake” – by using rhyme the child could then read and spell other words with the same ending such as ‘rake’, ‘bake’, ‘make’ etc. Onset and rime is a very effective way of helping a child build up a large sight vocabulary. One reason why nursery rhymes have endured the test of time is because they are a useful way of teaching this skill informally, as well as being great fun! Nursery rhymes are also excellent at teaching basic concepts such as colours, days of the week, letter sounds and basic numbers so next time you are sitting in a circle with other mums waving your hands in the air singing about stars twinkling remember the learning advantages your child is gaining from this activity!!
Visual Memory – In order to read well, children need to recognise both letter and word shapes. Games which improve visual memory are vitally important as we all need to develop a sight vocabulary in order to become a good reader: this is partly because this increases fluency but also because some words are phonetically irregular. Unfortunately for us, English is not a phonic language and many of our common everyday words therefore cannot be ‘sounded out’. Activities such as “I Spy”, drawing around letters, drawing and making objects from memory are excellent at developing visual memory.
Print Direction. – It may sound logical to us but a child has to learn that English books are read from left to right, top to bottom – this is known as the basic mechanics of books. Story-telling, using Big Books that the children can read with the teacher is vital in developing this skill. Many activity classes have a story time included in their sessions.
Motor Skills – A motor skill is a skill required for a human to move skeletal muscles in a controlled way. Gross motor skills refer to movement of the larger muscles, e.g. arm, leg, and fine motor skills to smaller muscles, e.g. hand, finger. Activity classes such as gymnastics and football help develop gross motor skills; creativity classes, where children use crayons, pens, scissors etc help to develop fine motor skills. Both gross and fine motor skills are important for writing.
Concepts of Print – Children have to learn first that print has meaning and then be able to decipher which squiggles mean something and which don’t! Children also have to learn that print comes in all forms not just in books, but on signs, shopping lists, on food packets and posters. By encouraging your child to read the signs when you are out and about will be a great help in teaching him to read.
Language Skills – We hear all the time about the importance of language and communication skills: the government has recently pledged £40 million to Every Child a Talker early years programme as well as £52 million to implementing the recommendations of MP John Bercow in his recent review of services for children with speech, language and communication needs. Language and communication skills are vital throughout life as our complex society relies on them. We need good communication skills not just in order to read fluently, effectively and efficiently, but at the global level to prevent world wars! However, for the young child, being able to speak clearly and confidently, to ask and answer questions, to express his needs, and to have a basic knowledge of words makes the difference between making good progress at school and finding schooling difficult.
As Margaret Sarl, a former early years teacher, says “You can really notice the difference with those children who have been to classes and those that haven’t; children that have already know the basics, consequently pick up reading quicker and are more confident at expressing themselves at school”. Margaret adds; “Activity classes help a child develop social skills such as listening, attentiveness, group-participation, turn-taking (vital to good conversation), confidence, observation, imagination, winning and losing, empathy, interaction and sharing”.
Therefore when we consider the essential life skills and learning development provided by many of the pre-school activity classes available it is clear that they represent more than an opportunity to entertain kids for an hour but contribute to their life long learning. Parents are the perfect teachers for their own young child; given confidence, skills and knowledge, all of which can be gained through activity classes, both parent and child will learn together. Not only that, the fun they share will help them form an even stronger emotional link which will develop as the child grows, thus making communication easier when the child hits those difficult teenage years and beyond. This can only benefit children, parents, the family unit and society itself.
All the above skills are taught in our Brightstarter classes, to find your nearest class please see our website: www.Brightstarters.co.uk
