Happy 1st Birthday!

Preschool Preparation for Academic Achievement

Educationists use literacy and numeracy skills attained by school children when aged eight as reliable indicators of a child’s future academic potential.  Knowing why they choose to test at age eight, and why they focus on literacy and numeracy, you can easily give very young children a valuable running start to do well when they enter school.

Why at age 8?

Very young children have a great capacity to learn. More recent scientific study, devoted to discovering how this happens, has shown that a blank stare can conceal a brain that is a hive of activity. 

Rapid early brain development is survival instinct at work, adapting as quickly as possible to recognise indicators of danger and safety: identifying individuals, interpreting their expressions and utterances, testing one’s responses to communicate. It requires building memory capacity to store the information and with that build pathways in the brain to access memory. Neglect and delay are harmful.

Brain growth in the first two years is phenomenal. This rapid pace continues through to ages five and six as it gradually slows. Although brain growth continues into adulthood and beyond, by age eight the phenomenal growth period has stabilised sufficiently to use that stage as a marker. 

Appropriate playful early stimulation will make a considerable difference to the individual’s development and potential at age eight to benefit from further academic study.

Why literacy?

Literacy refers to understanding, speaking, reading and writing a language to develop the important ability to communicate effectively with others. 

Languages are manmade, highly developed and intricate, so there’s a great deal to learn and understand in developing this skill.

Little children make an early start as they learn to say their first few simple words, building on them to improve their ability to speak and understand the language. If they are read stories and shown how the written words can be interpreted they’ll learn to read.

The infant’s ability to learn a new language is said to peak at about 16 months and to be in decline from then on. Add to that phenomenal ability the ability to simultaneously learn more than one distinct language, to keep them separate and speak each as a native. Make the most of this!

Books and alphabet blocks are typical teaching aids.

Why Numeracy ?

Numeracy is the ability to reason and apply simple numeric concepts.

Wikipedia

Numeracy is essentially ‘the ability to reason’. Reasoning is what binds literacy and numeracy together and why they are equally important. Literacy is used to teach numeracy and numeracy adds comprehension to literacy – helping us to say what we mean and understand what we hear and read. And together these skills aid cognition, the mental process of acquiring knowledge.

This is why a young child showing good progress with literacy and poor progress with numeracy is likely to exhibit the same tendencies at age eight; while a young child showing good progress with numeracy and poor progress with literacy is likely to exhibit good progress with both by age eight. 

Numeric concepts (counting, adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing) are universally adopted manmade reasoning norms and tools based on logic that have to be learned. Numeracy advances by becoming mathematics with its set of tools for ever more complex and precise hypothetical reasoning.

Infants have an instinctive aptitude for numeracy as they play peek-a-boo. Start very gradually with elementary logic, teaching the meaning of simple words such as more, less, bigger, smaller, same, different. Name colours and simple geometric shapes, and draw attention to similarities and differences in them and the patterns they make.  

Fortunately young children are fascinated by MOZIBLOX’s colourful cubes. Inspecting cubes and building with them, developing hand-eye coordination and dexterity. Shapes and colour versatility encourages exploration that is rewarded by discovering new patterns and pictures, by seeing similarities and differences, learning new words. Patterns and puzzles develop working memory.

Asking ‘How many more?’ will lead to learning conventions for counting; and thereafter the need to learn the symbols for numerals and signs for plus, minus, multiply, divide, equals. Numeric concepts that can be learned at home before Grade R when numeracy is introduced.

MOZIBLOX is a superb teaching aid for numeracy and makes a great First Birthday gift. Whereas most baby toys are age specific, MOZIBLOX has a seemingly endless number of patterns and pictures to make, with more and more to learn as they get older. The 3D puzzles are for older children, even challenging for adults! If preserved this is a toy that can be handed down from generation to generation. It allows impulsive exploration and provides that important foundation in Reality, the foundation for a future in Virtual Reality; features missing with online digital ‘swipe and point to’ teaching aids.

Developing initiative, curiosity and excellent reasoning skills may ultimately be education’s most useful future-proofing offering.

Help them get that early start.