IMAGINE THAT! Hello Weather Week 11

FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING

Patterned, Predictable Texts: In the preschool years sensitizing children to sound similarities does not seem to be strongly dependent on formal training but rather on listening to patterned, predictable texts while enjoying the feel of reading and language.

Preparation for Keyboard or String Lessons: Learning to control finger movements is necessary for the fine motor skills required for holding a pencil, using scissors, buttoning a shirt, or tying a shoe. Activities that focus on the ability to isolate and manipulate one finger at a time are excellent preparation for keyboard or string lessons, both of which require a special control of fingers and thumb. Furthermore, manipulating fingers helps people stay mentally alert.

Literacy: Literacy is listening, learning, and quality of life. It is reading, writing, thinking, scribbling, drawing, and being motivated to find meaning. It is interpreting, inventing, associating, communicating, responding, sharing, and being able to set visions into action. Our challenge as educators is to make it possible for all children regardless of ability, experience, or cultural heritage, to feel successful in their attempts to be literate.

Singing: Singing is a child’s most direct form of musical experience. Singing does not need any external aid or media; it lets children as well as adults be responsible for the production of the music. In a sense, when we sing, we become the music. This immediacy is becoming less and less available in other musical experiences, in which the music is performed for us by professional musicians or is mediated by electronic means.

Space Perception: Movement is the essential ingredient of space perception. By observing his own body and the relationship among objects in space to parts of his body, a child relates himself to the space outside himself. After some activities moving in his own space, a child may become aware of others moving around him.

Safety Net: Rocking quietly in the warmth of a loving adult’s arms provides a secure safety net during this time in a preschooler’s struggle between dependence and independence. For the moment she has mastered her impulses and dealt with a stimulating world outside her own four walls and is free to settle into the comfort of a loving adult’s embrace.

Abstract Thinking: The kind of pretend play found in the Skater’s Waltz allows children to practice separating objects from their real-life uses, developing abstract thinking. Abstract thinking is required in order to understand symbolic representation, the first steps of learning to read and write.