Learning Readiness for Young Children

Dilara Begum : The terms of learning readiness mean positive behavioral and academicals groundwork for the youngsters who are going to participate in the formal education program at a certain age level. The young children age 3 to 5 are considered as preschoolers and kindergarten years. Program for young children with disabilities are classified into two groups: 1) program for infants and toddlers (birth to age three). 2) Program for preschoolers (age three to six). These children are eligible for early intervention services because of developmental delays in several developmental domains, (Reauthorized IDEA, P.L 105-17). Before entering in formal school, all young children require some mastered skills in academic and behavioral domains.

Parent’s role in enhancing child’s learning ability

Parents are the first teacher to their child. Parent’s responsibility is to observe child’s age appropriate developmental milestones that child exhibits at a certain age range. Since children are multifaceted learners, parents or caregivers must emphasize on child’s social-emotional, intellectual, and physical development domains, so that successful learning can take place. By engaging children in structured group play activities with blocks, toys, puzzles, play dough, painting, drawing, and various kinds of art and craft materials, parents and caregivers can improve child’s motor skills as well as expressive and receptive language, and activities of daily living skills. Parents also can enhance each child’s literacy skills by reading child’s age-appropriate storybook with very simple words and sentences that are easy to pronounce for the child and motivate the children to recognize some words familiar with child’s world. For the improvement of social-emotional skills, parents can provide plenty of opportunities to engage children in pretend, constructive and purposeful play activities with their peers outside the home before starting school.

Teacher’s role in enhancing child’s learning ability

Learning is successful when educators and learners actively involve in the lesson. According to Dewey’s theory, the teachers should have more confidence when planning children’s learning experiences. Dewey thought that children need assistance from teachers in making sense of their world (Mooney, 6). Learning is easier when it occurs naturally. Learning is a function of the change in overt’. Changes in behavior are the result of an individual’s response to events (stimuli) that occur in the environment”, (B. Skinner, 1938). Therefore, the teacher should have the ability to create child-centered high-quality constructive learning atmosphere to enhance each child’s individual learning ability. Teachers should also have the capacity to follow the comprehensive curriculum and consistent patterns in moving a child from one activity to the next in the classroom. To the parents, teacher’s massage should be clear and effective about the program, curriculum, content, and materials. The physical environment of classroom and learning materials should be child’s age appropriate. The teacher needs to follow activity schedule that includes constructive group play activity with small and large group setting, and individual action. Children need reinforcement and prompt to increase their effort. The teacher needs to provide support for children’s good work and also needs to provide prompt to help them learn complex tasks perfectly.

Types of learning readiness:

Social readiness : Vygotsky (1978) realized that most learning occurs as people interact with each other. Young children can approach new relationships with confidence if they have experienced satisfying interaction with a group of peers and have thereby acquired such social skills as greeting people, taking turns, making compromises, sharing toys and approaching unfamiliar children. Parents and preschool teachers can improve child’s   social interacting skills by offering wide variety play activities in small and large group settings. Parents of special needs children can develop child’s social-emotional, speech, motor and adaptive skills by enrolling children in the early intervention program. Special education teachers, speech, occupational, and physical therapists can help these children to improve their deficits on related domains; by engaging them in matching, imitation, music, and picture- exchange-communication system training.

Parents and teachers should keep in mind that even though children learn through a natural process, learning attainment differs on children’s individual learning ability and intelligence. Some kids are born with developmental delays in several domains; these children need special help from the parents or teachers to improve their learning ability for their future life. Typically, children feel comfortable if they can understand the language of the peers and the adults they meet in school. They also feel more comfortable when they can share their ideas with related activities presented by the teacher in the classroom. Parents and educators can help to improve children’s intellectual ability by offering the activities like sorting group objects by categories, matching object to object, picture to object, and picture to picture, recall missing objects and remembers missing words from the story. The children can also improve their intellectual ability by engaging in group play activity including various kinds of creative activities such as dramatic play, art, and craft, drawing, coloring and reading games with small and large group setting

Academic readiness: The term of academic preparation is to prepare young children for literacy development in reading and writing. Developmentally appropriate practice suggests that teach young children with fun. Children should learn through play activity, Imitating words, listening story, rhymes, song, scribbling on paper, and interring with each other.  Reading and writing are the processes of communication in expressive and receptive language. Oral language is inherent but written language is erudite. Thus it is better to teach written language by child’s age, ability, intelligence and interest. In teaching, reading and writing are the parallel processes. Thus anyone capable of learning the oral language should also be perfectly capable of reading and writing.

Reading readiness:  Children learn reading through the use of print materials, hold the book upside down, pointing familiar pictures and by participating in various kinds of reading game instructed by the adult. Gradually children learn to hold the book correctly, turn over the page and recognize familiar words. The first stage of reading readiness is building vocabulary and phonemic awareness. Teacher and parents can help the children to develop their vocabulary by loud reading and read different kinds of storybooks, rhymes, by singing and listening to children songs, and by taking for outdoor trips. The teacher also can teach the students to segment and blend by applying the age appropriate reading materials and strategies such as group reading, share reading, loud reading and emergent reading; to apply these strategies gradually teacher will be able to teach the students as their reading level pre-k through the elementary level.

Writing Readiness: Writing is the symbolic language of communication. Reading and writing are correlative. Reading content should be in writing form. In writing form, there are visual symbols with sounds and phonemes. There are also some symbols of intonation; these are called punctuations. The children learn to write through intentional play. For the readiness of writing activities for preschools, teacher and parents can apply some gross and fine motor activities by practicing play with blocks, string beads, pegboards, puzzles, coloring, and painting, so that later the children will be mastered in dynamic grasp, appropriate finger dexterity and eye-hand coordination skills. The first step of writing is a scribble those are unreadable, and then the children learn to trace, color within the line, draw a picture and then copy and gradually learn to write the letters, words, and sentences. The teacher should follow the convention of writing developmental scale and should have to observe the level of each student. The levels are emerging, pictorial, pre-communicative, semi-phonetic, phonetic, transitional, conventional and advanced.

All human beings are born with a brain, but the functions of the brain are not similar for all. Some children are born with a neurological syndrome characterized by several deficits. Those children need special help for learning. In recent years, research has identified several instructional strategies as useful in teaching young children with developmental disabilities. The plans include errorless learning and discrete-trials teaching, incidental teaching and natural environment teaching. Reinforcement therapy is also an effective method to increase child’s effort. Special education teacher can apply those strategies to enhance the learning quality of children with developmental disabilities.