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How Young Children Learn
The Basics:
Brain cells, or neurons,
communicate with one another through connections called synapses.
Strings of neurons and synapses form roads or pathways through which
information flows. In infancy and early childhood, these neural
pathways - similar to highway systems - become highly developed.
As the child matures, information highways that are well traveled expand,
mapping the way for the individual to become more proficient in those
skills. Information highways less traveled make communication
between neurons more difficult. On those less-traveled roads of
information and experience, the individual is less able.
Think about your own
strengths and weaknesses. If you are uncomfortable in social settings, it
may be because when you were a young child, your experiences interacting
with people were either negative or limited. Those neural pathways never
strengthened, therefore you still find social settings stressful. Your
social-interaction road is bumpy on its less-traveled neural path. In
contrast, your exceptional artistic ability may have been influenced by
your exposure to spatial relationships, color, intensity, tone, value,
hue, and creative experiences amid positive emotion, when you were young.
These neural pathways are now sophisticated, intricate superhighways.
Born to Read: With this in mind (no pun intended), how do we help
young children form well-developed neural pathways for literacy?
Enabling a child to become a proficient reader begins in infancy with the
development of neural pathways about language.
Studies show that infants whose parents talk to them more frequently will
develop a greater awareness of language patterns, timing, linguistic
rhythms, and a large, though yet unspoken, vocabulary. As young
children become skilled in manipulating language, they learn to listen for
and identify the characteristic nuances contained in the language.
Becoming aware of letter sounds (phonemic awareness), emphasis on one
syllable over another, pitch, and volume, all contribute to the
development of oral language skills … and all add to the strengthening of
the neural language highway. When a child achieves reading readiness
and begins to make the transition from oral language to written language,
it is upon this foundational knowledge base - through these neural
language highways - that he develops the skills for reading.
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