The Internet offers us a great number of possibilities and opportunities to continue learning as at school, but from home, from the office, from where they are located.
Nowadays, the access to videos and applications is easy... Most of videos and apps that we share are meant to review letters, sounds, numbers and other PreK concepts. With our mobile devices we can accelerate our learning, as well as having fun! why not to try with kids, too?
I want to share with you the steps to follow to work them at home.
1. Full video viewing.
First of all, we invite our "campeones" to watch a funny video, the ones that we use at school. We don't need to spend so much time during this activity since most of videos are short. If this is the first time you see them, please pay attention to the video, since the following activities are related to them.
To check comprehension, we can ask you questions like:
- What's the video about? - What do you like the most? - What is your favorite __________? - Can you draw (and / or write, if they already know) what you liked the most?
2. View by parts.
We'll work with the video little by little. Why pauses?
Because we will stop to repeat and produce the sounds of the letters or words that appear in the video. In case of difficulty, we will help our kids by inviting them to see it again or we will teach them how to do it.
For example, in the video that we give as an example, we find the first letter: A.
We pause and ask: - What letter is it? - What is the name of this letter? - What is the sound of this letter?
(Let's try to avoid expressions like "you know how ...", since the little ones will respond most of the times and they will not produce them).
In case of presenting difficulties we will use the image (APPLE), and we ask them the following questions: What fruit do you see? What is it? Can you say/pronounce its first sound? (or the last since both are A in this case)
We positively reinforce their answers with the following expressions: "very good" "Excellent"
"Great job"
If, on the other hand, we do not have positive answers, we try to offer them other help such as "repeat after me ...". We can teach them how to trace the letters on the screen while we (together) repeat the sound and name it.
For the most advanced students, we can invite them to the following activities-games:
- I see, I see a little thing that starts with the letter ... And they have to guess what is the one that starts with that letter.
- How many things in the room begin with this letter?
- How many things in the room end with this letter?
- Tell me other words that you know start / end with this letter.
Other variants can be write and read. For example, with one of your favorite book stories you can ask the same questions that we have asked for the room.
3- Again full viewing of the video without sound.
In this last part of the activities we can see the full video again and play to see how many letters and sounds you know. For each one that they know (by themselves) we can make points and those points can be exchanged for things they like. By doing so we motivate them to learn the letters and sounds, it will be very fun!
Can you try at home? How many points will you get?
Exploring and experimenting are key in our first years of life. Our own nature pushes us to learn by seeing, touching, smelling, listening, tasting,... all our senses are needed in this process.
Everyday in my classroom I can see my students enjoying with the hands-on activities, the materials in the workstations,... They always approach the stations of learning and attracted by the materials begin to use them and admired make comments to others. These experiences are precious since they develop many skills as cognitive, communicative, social,... It´s sad when sometimes we hear just at this moment the voice of the teacher/parents/legal guardian to keep silent and to make a line, indicating "it is not worth touching, just seeing".
Many theories of learning tells us that the child's learning in our early years has to do with our thinking levels; it is necessary to keep in mind the object and not only to observe it but to interact with it if we want them to question, reflect, imagine, generate ideas,... The object, by itself in front of the person who learns about it, does not serve as mediator of learning, it is not through a merely contemplative act (visual) as knowledge is constructed, that is, the object is an instrument whose function is to trigger cognitive development. (see my post about Bloom´s Taxonomy)
The first impulse of children when they are in front of an object is to touch it and ask. These are opportunities to foster the intellectual curiosity that surely leads to cognitive development. Touching the object is synonymous with questioning about it. For this reason, the adult must be close to them to answer their questions, to ask them questions, to explain its characteristics. The role of the teachers (and educators/parents/legal guardians) is to solve the doubts of children, trying to offer real explanations that stimulate their curiosity and cognitive processes.
Learning from the use of objects (Vigotsky, 2000)
Parents/legal guardians/educators should invite children to manipulate the objects and ask him interesting questions that awake their interest and stimulate their expression (communicative skills), reflection and analysis (thinking levels).
In fact there are those researchers who affirm that intelligence is measured by the use of instruments to solve problems, based on the Latin origin of the word:
inteligere, composed of intus (between) and legere (choose);
so we can deduce that being smart is knowing how to choose the best option among those given to solve a problem
When children look at an object they immediately have the desire to understand it, and manipulating it is the best way to do it. The work in the classroom must include the contents within natural situations making connections with situations of real life and this implies the interaction of the children with real objects.
To prevent children from mistreating objects, we are only showing our dark side of the teaching. If it is a very delicate or dangerous object for the child, we must help him with care to touch him and explain the reasons for it.
Interact with the reality is the basis of learning, questioning reality and recreating it to understand it is the body, develop cognitive processes and generate knowledge is its maximum expression. Even adults need to touch objects, for example: to show us a shirt is not enough to tell us it is cotton, we immediately touch it. To ask toddlers/young children not to touch and only observe is to attempt against their nature and their right to learn.
Infant visual stimulation help children see better. The more vision is used, the greater the likelihood of better visual functioning. The driving thrust of visual stimulation is to help the child develop all of his physical and emotional abilities.
From birth, children use visual skills to progressively conquer their environment. The eye gives them the necessary information about the size, shapes and colors of the objects and people around them and the movements they perform. The visual stimuli they receive invite them to explore space, to move the toy and to smile at their mother as she approaches.
Good vision also helps them improve their eye-hand coordination by picking up objects within their reach or by looking at them. His first steps are facilitated by the vision, and the conquest of space and the exit to the unfamiliar environment demand a visual capacity running at full capacity.
Early visual stimulation in infants
The child with visual difficulties should learn all this as well, but he needs guidance in the way of this learning. With an early stimulation of the visual learning processes this goal can be achieved and avoided that this visual deficiency can lead to alterations in his/her personality because the visual disability is also multifunctional. With the early stimulation of visual-motor skills the ability to think and with it the opportunity to deal with people also varies. This facilitates social behavior and the ability to assert oneself in a group.
The evolutionary visual acuity of infants
The development of visual acuity is necessary for the evolution of the accommodation. Visual acuity improves by three months and approaches the adult's own values at six months. When two years later, the child uses his vision in increasingly complex tasks, it is usually discovered that there is a problem.
Learning to see better in childhood
Visual stimulation is a technique that requires the preparation of an individualized program of activities that follows a sequence of visual experiences aimed at seeking an improvement in visual functioning.
How to stimulate the child's vision
The more vision is used, the greater and better visual functioning. Therefore, visual stimulation will be more likely to succeed, if you take these recommendations into account:
- Short age. The smaller the child, the greater the likelihood of rapid progress in the use of vision.
- Motivation. Girls and boys need to be encouraged to use their vision in all tasks and activities so that they can progress.
- Keep in touch. Teach the low vision child to work by keeping eye contact with objects and especially with people.
- Explore. Stimulate outdoor exploration in the playground or in physical education classes allowing normal falls caused by the mis-calculation of distances. Overprotection should be avoided.
- Promote reading. Even when you read very slowly, moving your head or book instead of your eyes. If you get tired and skip lines or lose the thread you can switch from task to one less visually demanding.
- Contrasts. White paper and black ink provide the highest visibility and contrast.
- Glasses and magnifying glasses. They favor the use of a person's vision, but can not return normal vision.
Visual Discrimination implies the ability to determine the exact characteristics of a form compared to others of similar characteristics. In the process of learning to read, it is important to have developed visual discrimination, otherwise they would encounter the following difficulties: Confusion of similar words. They confuse similarities and differences. Errors in words with similar beginnings or endings We propose to practice Visual Discrimination in children with these illustrative and entertaining exercises.
“Early language and communication skills are crucial for children’s success in school and beyond”
“Children who develop strong language and communication skills are more likely to arrive at school ready to learn and are more likely to have higher levels of achievement”
Oral communication is an essential aspect for the integral development of the child. The development of thought, memory, imagination, the ability to learn, to know the environment around him, to learn to transform it as well as many other cognoscitive skills.
The progressive characteristics of the development of verbal language in the different levels of age, are ascribed to the stages of integral development of the child, being closely associated with the following aspects:
• The maturation process of the nervous system, both central (CNS) and peripheral, correlating its progressive changes with motor development in general and with the particular vocal apparatus.
• To the cognitive development that includes from the perceptual discrimination of spoken language to the function of the processes of symbolization and thought.
• And, to socio-emotional development, which is the result of the influence of the socio-cultural environment, child interactions and reciprocal influences
And why are they so important? Because by developing language and communication skills children can develop different actions that improve their self-image and esteem, since they can understand others and can explain themselves, what make them feel motivated to communicate with others. Communication involves using words, body language, gestures, or facial expressions. Toddlers who develop conversation skills are more likely to succeed academically. Besides, they develop problem-solving skills that help them have higher stages of achievement.
The interactions that children have with adults have an effect on how children broaden and analyze. Those interactions should start with the family, since parents and siblings talk with the child, and later, at school, with their teachers and classmates. As a result, at school Early Childhood teachers offer them multiple opportunities with interactions which support kid's improvement. It is important to underline the fact of language instruction in early stages of education: simple sentences, adapted to children’s level of comprehension and checking questions. These characteristics of adult-child communication will help children foster their increase and improvement in language interaction and conversation.
In this process, adults should use nouns, adjectives, and actions that form part of the child's daily life. This undoubtedly contributes directly and effectively to the development of language, intelligence and other areas with which this learning will be carried out.
Stages of Language Development
According to the previous references and taking into account the contributions of different researchers, here we divided the development of the language in two main stages:
• Prelinguistic Stage
• Linguistic Stage
Each of these stages is marking the emergence of new properties and phonemic, syntactic and semantic qualities as the child grows, as we will describe below.
• Prelinguistic Stage (preverbal stage - from 0 to 12 months of age)
It is characterized by the expressions with mouth movements and sounds which in itself has hardly any communicative value, most of the sounds emitted are onomatopoeic. During this stage, which covers the first year of life, the communication that establishes the child his environment (family), especially and particularly with his mother, is emotional and gestural. As part of a proper language stimulation, the word should always accompany the gesture and activities of the mother with her baby.
Lately, neuroscience and neurolinguistics have proved the importance of this preverbal stage, that has a relevant and transcendental value in the configuration of the bases of Linguistic development, since both vocal expressions (sounds or group of sounds of simple signification) and verbal expressions (sounds, group of sounds, isolated words, etc.) influence in a decisive way in the later development of the linguistic communication of the child.
This stage comprises, in turn, substeps or stages with particular characteristics that are in agreement with the chronological sequence of the integral development of the child, which we describe:
a) From birth to month and/or two months
During this period the only expression that is heard of the baby is crying, which is the first sound manifestation purely mechanical or reflective and, as such, undifferentiated in tone, whatever the reason of its state.
With crying, the baby puts into operation the speech apparatus, allowing him also oxygenation of the blood and the establishment of normal breathing. After this period, usually at the beginning of the second month, crying is no longer a phenomenon or a mechanical and undifferentiated manifestation, but the tone of the sound changes with the emotional content of pain, hunger or other discomfort; that is, the variation of the tonality is related to the state of well-being or discomfort of the baby. With the crying the baby manages to communicate his needs to the world around him and, as he realizes that thanks to crying his needs are satisfied, he will use it voluntarily, no longer being then a reflex or undifferentiated sound. That way the baby is communicating with its immediate surroundings, especially with master, understanding better and better what it communicates to him, although he is incapable of expressing it.
b) From 3 to 4 months
At the beginning of the third month the baby produces guttural sounds and vowels that last 15 to 20 seconds. It responds to Human sounds through smiling, cooing or murmuring.
At this age the baby already distinguishes between the sounds: / pa /, / ma /, / ba /, / ga /. Their vocalizations can already show joy or other feelings. The baby knows how to distinguish, affectionate intonations, reacting with joy, surprise or fear to the tone of voice, especially of their parents. At three months appears the babbling, which consists of the emission of sounds through redoubled syllables like "ma ... ma" , "Ta ... ta" and others.
In this way the child is progressing and increasing his vocalizations, which are already close to the word and, as such, are loaded with communicative intention with the mother. These varied vocal sounds and phonations close to the word that the child directs to the mother, must be attended to, understood, interpreted and answered by it in a repetitive way, stimulating and thus promoting its linguistic development.
c) From 5 to 6 months
The “babbling” (first attempt of communication) extends until the eighth or ninth month, progressing in the fifth and sixth month towards what is called "imitation of sounds". This begins in the form of self-limitations of the sounds produced by the child (circular reaction). Later it begins to repeat sounds that the adult or another child produces.
In this age there are clearly discernible intonation structures in certain contexts in which it emphasizes and excites.
The earliest vowel utterances are phonetic realizations that appear in the following order:
• / a / and variants close to the phoneme / e /, although before they usually emit sounds similar to / oe /
• Then the / or / and finally appears / i /, / u /.
The sounds of the consonants appear later in the following order:
• Labials: p (pa
-b) m (ma-ma) b (ba-ba)
• Dentales: d (da-da) t (ta-ta)
• Velopalatales: g (ga-ga) j (ja-ja)
In this way the child usually emits the first vowel and consonant elements, being an important progress with respect to the cries and different laryngeal sounds of the first months of life. As the child progresses, he will gradually replace gesture communication with verbal language.
Here it is important to emphasize the utmost importance of maternal language directed to the child during the middle of the first year of life, in which not only it is convenient to increase vocalizations, gestures, smiles and other expressions within the home, but also verbal communication should be something common among adults and the child.
d) From 7 to 10 months
Bruner (1979) points out that between 7 and 10 months the child progressively shifts from the "modality of demand" to the modality of exchange and reciprocity in child-child interactions. The giving and receiving of objects pronouncing the name of each one, while looking at the mother and son face and looking at the object together, manages to multiply and enrich the linguistic and communicative capacity of the child, this "conversation" forming a training exercise for speech , As well as for his nascent socialization. At this age the child performs multiple spontaneous vocalizations, both vocalic and consonantal, and even syllables and diphthongs. These vocalizations next to the word, are those that will soon lead the child to utter his first words. Here the alternating vocalizations between mother and child will allow early access to language.
e) From 11 to 12 months
The 11-month-old baby has more than five words in his linguistic repertoire. In this age the child uses the same words as the adult, but does not attribute the same meaning to them. However, as it progresses in this process, the meanings that are attributed to the words are approaching the meanings attributed by the adult.
In this way the child is forced to simplify adult language, without this meaning that he does not understand, but his expressive capacity is still very limited. However, according to some specialists, at 11 or 12 months the child usually articulates his first words "fingers" direct syllables: "mom", "dad", "poop", "tata", starting the next sentence or denominated linguistic or verbal, progressively sign language and "overcoming" the simplification of adult language as it increases his/her vocabulary.
With regard to the appearance of the "first word", it should be clarified that this depends on the moment the parents identify him as such, since the units of meaning that the child uses correspond to segments of speech. The child of this age (a year) usually occupies the center of attention of the family, whose actions, thanks and occurrences are usually celebrated and applauded, reinforcing the behavior, which will be repeated over and over again. This is good because it helps the child feel and live their own identity. In addition, the mimic and verbal gesture exchange of his communications with the adult, accompanied by the "giving and taking" behavior, allows the greater development of language.
• Linguistic Stage
a) From 12 to 18 months
Within his lexical repertoire he counts with 5 to 15 or 20 words, and each time he will demonstrate greater increase in his vocabulary by means of the inflections of his voice when he wants to identify something. Einsenson maintains that in this stage the true speech arises and it indicates that the child uses words to produce events or attract the attention of others. In some fairly advanced children, it is usually observed the use of some phrases with two words, mainly objects or actions, without ruling out in certain cases, also, the use of adjectives (qualifiers). However, before being able to make word-finger combinations, he will often continue to use a single word to refer to many objects. This semantic extension in childhood vocalizations will continue to accompany him for a long time. But as you increase your vocabulary and evolve your speech, you will progressively reduce this semantic extension.
From 16 or 17 months to two years of age, you will increasingly make the use of spontaneous combinations of several words and phrases, increasing the flow of words in its expression.
At 17 months the child increasingly extends his linguistic repertoire and begins to make combinations of two words. At this age, the identification and naming of objects, figures and different parts of one's body are highly recommended exercises for the development of the child's verbal language.
b) From 18 to 24 months
During this period, most children have a vocabulary greater than 50 words, going on to combine 2 to 3 words in a sentence, beginning with "syntactic" speech, that is, the child begins to articulate words in sentences and simple sentences. In their verbal expressions they use nouns (Names), verbs (actions) and qualifiers (adjectives and adverbs). Among these grammatical classes usually establish the following relationships:
• Between two names/nouns: "Shoe dad" (possessor and object possessed) "soup chair" (fortuitous relationship)
• Between name and verb: "Open door" (verb and object) "Papa eats" (subject and verb)
• Between qualifiers and adjectives: "Beautiful doll" (qualifier plus name) "More game" (qualifier plus verb) "More beautiful" (qualifier plus qualifier)
By the age of two, the child has a vocabulary of approximately 300 words. In their expressions, the use of the personal pronouns "I" and "You" and the possessive "My" and "Mine" are also observed. His phrases express intention and action: "he does what he says and says what he does".
At this age the symbolic function in the child arises and the predominance of the intelligence-motorist gives rise to the representational intelligence. With the symbolic function the child has the ability to mentally represent things and evoke them without the need for them to be present. With the symbolic capacity, gestures and verbal expressions of the child begin to refer more and more frequently to more abstract realities, becoming more dominant In language. (Significant) symbols come to play a unique role in the development of the child afterwards, since these are the ones that will allow us to construct the codes on which the bases of the higher functions conform.
Through these codes is that we access emotions, abstract realities, language and convert the implicit explicit. This symbolic ability allows the child to explore and increase their verbal language, expressing interest in hearing stories about themselves or their family, in Which vacapt the sense of the words and sentences of the stories that the parents give.
Here you can find more information about the importance of language development at the age of two.
c) From 2 to 3 years old
There is a rapid increase in vocabulary, an increase that is much greater than what will occur later, reaching an average of 850 words and at three and a half years more than 1200 words (Smith, 1980).
The child in his verbal expressions already employs auxiliary verbs "to have" and "to be" and gives a certain prevalence to the determined article. In the course of this age begins to use the propositions and the child already has a understandable language use, even for people outside the family, manifesting a mastery of the majority of the grammar of their mother tongue (syntax), so that the specialists pronounce him as the period of "syntactic competence".
D) From 4 to 5 years old
At the age of four, the child virtually dominates the grammar, but begins expressing and pointing out. The child begins to use the pronouns in the following order: I, You, He, She, We-you, You; With a vocabulary of 1,500 words and at five years, 2,300 words approximately.
Among the 4 or 5, the child is usually already trained to answer questions related to the social behavior learned, since their language already extends beyond the immediate environment. This is due to the symbolic capacity of the child and, as such, can mentally evoke and represent things, actions and situations, transcending the reality and the present. This ability and the need to communicate, make possible a greater and rapid development of children's language, Also facilitating the development of intelligence.
If you are interested in "More Than Baby Talk" with its 10 ways to promote language development, click on here.
This is a brief summary of the process of verbal language development that occurs in average children, such as evolutionary psychology, psycholinguistics and others describe it. In this process many factors intervene, all closely linked to the development of the child. It should be noted that the development of verbal expression is usually after the understanding of language, that is, the development of the capacity for comprehension is anticipated to that of the verbal expression.
