FAMILY Time: Here, There, & Everywhere Week 9

FOUNDATIONS OF LEARNING

Hearing & Listening: Listening and hearing are very different skills. Most of the senses – sight, taste, smell – involve chemical reactions, but ears work purely mechanically. Hearing is a physical process. Sound waves create vibrations that are transmitted as nerve impulses to the brain. Listening is much more complex, as it includes the mental processes of interpreting and absorbing a message and storing and retrieving information. Hearing is a sense most people are born with, but listening is a learned, mental behaviour.

The Joy of Listening: Children instinctively understand the language of music. Music draws children into its orbit, inviting them to match its pitches, incorporate its lyrics, move to its beat, and explore its emotional and harmonic dimensions. Music’s physical vibrations, organized patterns, engaging rhythms, and subtle variations interact with the mind and body. Children are happy when they are bouncing, dancing, clapping, and singing with someone they trust and love. Even as music delights, it helps mold children’s mental, emotional, social, and physical development – and gives them the enthusiasm and skills they need to begin to teach themselves.

Sign Language for Hearing Children: Children begin trying to decipher the mystery of language from the moment they are born. It takes children 12 to 24 months to begin speaking, yet while they are preparing for this huge leap forward, they already have some of the pieces in place. Signing with hearing children takes advantage of their motor abilities, which develop months earlier than the equivalent skills required for speech. Use signing in everyday interactions to open the door to early communication, facilitated speech, increased intimacy, and long-term learning.

Literacy: When a child points to pictures in a book, she is letting you know that she understand something about symbols – that words and pictures represent things and ideas. A child’s motivation to learn about and use symbols grows as she learns that this is how she can make her needs known and let people know what she is thinking. “Literacy” means so much more than being able to read and write. Literacy is being able to speak, and understand what you read, write, and hear. Children who are “literate” know that sounds, letters, pictures, and ideas go together and have meaning.