Tonight I attended a professional development seminar led by Wendy Perera entitled Pathways to School. In her introduction she alluded to the connections between the body and the brain and the importance of movement and spatial awareness in the formative years of pre-school education.
Wendy believes that there is a degree of sensory deprivation in the younger generation. I agree that these days the change in lifestyles and living arrangements for children and the lack of access to outdoor spaces for many learners does result in a lack of opportunities for sensory exploration in an outdoor setting. I think that these problems are wider than just children choosing to spend more time on screens indoors, it is part of a wider social problem involving time-poor or disinterested parents, a lack of natural outdoor space due to the intensification of housing in inner city suburbs and a lack of access to public or private transport due to rises in the costs of living. Wendy believes that children should be encouraged to go barefoot- however followed this up with a statement about how we lose 90% of our body heat through our head- something that is often quoted but is actually a misunderstanding of the fact that by wearing a hat you can stop heat loss through your head, which unfortunately made me question the veracity of the next 2 hours of her session. I had to fight against my own cynicism that if someone cannot calculate the improbability of losing 90% of a body’s heat through less than 10% of the body’s mass, it casts doubt on the accuracy of their quoted statistics.
Wendy introduced the situation of the chair-tipper, a child rocking on her chair. This indicated that they are craving vestibular stimulation, a system involving the inner ear canal and the sense of balance. “The most advanced form of balance is to sit still”, how do we get someone to sit still- by asking them to roll, move, turn and twist. She suggests having a towel by the door of the classroom and encouraging children to roll up in it before coming in. This, she states, will satiate some of their desire to flex and roll while sitting on the mat.
Children who slam doors accidentally or squeeze their friends too tightly do not have an understanding of their proproception, their spatial relation skills. If this skill is not developed, it can affect later brain development in the limbic and cortex regions. These later regions are what makes reading, writing and maths possible. Used the metaphor of the washing basket having holes plugged when skills are acquired in order to keep the water (knowledge) in.
One thing that I did agree with was her belief in the research that suggests that for a child less than 2 years old they should have zero screen time, and after 2 only a very carefully selected learning programme for no longer than 1-2 hours a day.
How do we know that a new skill has become automated? I can take it to a new learning place and do it, or I can answer an unrelated question while performing a skill, therefore the cortex has been accessed. An example of this is singing a song while using scissors, younger children will struggle to open the scissors for each new cut, when the motion has been rehearsed and is automated, children could cut while singing a song. When a child’s tongue moves to one side of their mouth and sticks out it is ‘midline’ related. As the tongue being the only movable organ in the middle of the body, when doing something tricky with one hand, the tongue will stick out of the opposite side of the mouth.
The human brain can only do one thinking task at a time- you cannot put a thinking task on top of another thinking task, but you can put a thinking task on top of an automated task, e.g. driving a car. The actions we need to complete to write need to be automated so that you can then move onto the thinking required to construct written language. Cortical grip, thumb underneath fist. This is a grip which is honed on the monkey bars on the playground, girls typically spend more time on the monkey bars than boys, this translates to better pencil grip.
Children process their learning from right brain to left, from the real to the symbolic. However, often the teaching is from symbolic to the real, the “a is for apple” paradigm of teaching the alphabet rather than experiencing the world and then acquiring the word, learning about apples, eating different types, then saying “apples start with the letter a”, and going from there.
The evolution of movement poster shows the crawling milestone before the sitting milestone. Reading recovery teachers often get their pupils to do some crawling. To be ready for school a child needs to be able to hang on the monkey bars and support their own body weight for 10 seconds. To be ready for school a child needs to be able to play with and manipulate balls or bean bags. A new statistic coming out of China shows that (almost) 90% of children have myopia, Wendy believes that this is due to screen time and indoor activity taking precedence over outdoor activities. She suggests using a balloon ball (like a beach ball), bubbles or a laser light pointer to improve eye tracking.
We were introduced to the concept of midlines, the points along the body where the top meets bottom, right meets left and front meets back. When offering a toy to a child, offer it to the midline rather than encouraging or forcing a dominant hand to take it. Homolaterality: An activity where one side of the body is moving and one is still, e.g. scootering or handwriting. Many children have issues with balance and movement due to their cross-lateral skills not having been properly developed.
A child who is ready for school needs to be able to follow simple directions, remember simple rhymes, retell simple stories that have been told or read, repeat verbal instructions in order that they have been given and have three spaces in his/her short term memory. The number of instructions a child can remember is their age minus two. 3 spaces for phonics, 4 spaces for computational maths, 6 spaces for reading.
This session was interesting and as a senior teacher made me more aware of the practicalities of running a junior class and the experiences children should be aiming to get during their ECE years.
Learning Through Teaching 