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How Young Children Learn - A Practical
Application
On our homepage, we discussed
the basic science of How Young Children Learn. Below are a
few experiences a young child may enjoy as you help to strengthen his oral
language pathways. Keep in mind that learning is strongly influenced by
emotion. The more positive the experience, the more learning takes place.
So laugh, be silly, be loving, be dramatic, be bigger than life.
Strengthening Oral Language: Children love to
be read to (see Reading With Your
Child). They also enjoy listening to poetry, tongue twisters, and
rhymes. Write your own poems and read some of the classics.
Play with foreign accents, dialects, and tones using
different inflections and emphasis. Create dialog for animals or
inanimate objects. For example, point to a washcloth
and in a high-pitched mouse-voice say, "EEEEEK,
my towel, Theodore, it is itty-bitty!!!"
Remember that exercises like these are not trivial. Your child is
receiving oral language cues that will strengthen and constantly
reorganize neural pathways during these early years.
Use drama to demonstrate the different uses of tone.
For example, when cooking pancakes, expressions such as "grilled to
perfection, luscious, fluffy, and light-as-a-feather" add to the child's
oral language development. The value of experiences similar to these may
not be fully apparent in the young child. He may still be unable to use
all that he is taking in - he is still in "receiving mode." The full fruit
of continued rich oral language experiences becomes more evident as the
child approaches kindergarten age. It is then that the first four years of
language development come to fruition, and the transformation is amazing.
Car conversations can both stimulate a child's
imagination and hone his language skills. At a long red light,
take turns providing tourist information. "Outside your window on the
right ..." Or have the child play taxi, explaining where he is going and
why. New York? Tennessee? California? Who does he plan to visit? What,
where, when, why, and how?
It makes sense! Use the 5 senses to stimulate
language. Take "sight walks," discussing what you see. Articulate what you
hear by playing "what's that sound?" Make a "feel bag" taking turns
filling it and guessing what is inside by touching the contents. Have a
"tasting party." Describe different smells by playing "name that fruit."
Waiting in line
at the grocery store, walking to the mailbox, and getting the newspaper
also offer opportunities for rich language use. Through deliberate
conversation, each dialog adds to a young child's
language neural pathway. It adds to his vocabulary vault. And it adds to
his foundation for fluent language and skilled literacy.
_________________________
"Language emerges from a
child's explorations of the world in a rich social setting."
"The best way to encourage development of language is to provide many
opportunities for a child to interact with objects and events ...."
"If children cannot master the fundamentals of language during their
preschool years, they are greatly at risk for educational achievement,
particularly for reading skills."
- From Language Development by B. Power and R. Hubbard,
Merrill/Prentice Hall 1996 as adapted from
Children's Language Acquisition by M.L. Rice.
American Psychologist, 44:2, pp. 149-156.
Copyright 1989 by the American Psychological Association
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