Play is the work of childhood!
Most children usually are quite at home with movement. They begin to learn about the world by acting on objects and people, and they “think with their bodies” well before they think with words. This is why body movement is not only fun for children but also a good opportunity for them to solve problems. When you ask questions that call for verbal responses (“Can you think of some other ways that Pooh could get up to the honey tree?” or “What did we do to make applesauce yesterday?”), some children may have difficulty responding in words. But when questions call for movement (“What are some ways you can think of to get from one side of the mat to the other?”), children aren’t limited by their verbal abilities. Movement problems challenge children in different ways and help teachers/parents learn about problem solving and creative abilities of less verbal children. This is just one way that learning through play and movement is helping to reach every child where they are on the kinetic scale.
The kinetic scale and the following article is from A Moving Child Is a Learning Child: How the Body Teaches the Brain to Think (Birth to Age 7) by Gill Connell and Cheryl McCarthy, copyright © 2014.
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Apple Is for A
All too often, when we talk about early learning, adults immediately think about learning letters and numbers. But a young child’s brain is concerned with developing the whole child—not just the future student.
Early childhood learning is a process of compiling tangible, physical, real-life, in-the-moment experiences one on top of the next. And the reason is simple. All learning, at any age, stands on the shoulders of prior knowledge— from the known to the unknown. That’s how the brain is designed.
For instance, consider the old saying “A is for Apple.” It’s shorthand for describing how children learn their letters. But in fact, it’s not correct. You see, for little ones, the sentence is backward and meaningless. It starts with the unknown instead of the known.
For kids, “Apple is for A” is what makes sense. It starts with the known (Apple) and relates it to the unknown (A). It moves from the tangible to the intangible, from the concrete to the symbolic. And that’s how children learn.
But of course, “Apple is for A” only makes sense if a child has had experience with apples first: personal, sensory experiences with real apples— seeing them, smelling them, holding them, tasting them, hearing them crunch, rolling them around the plate, enjoying them in applesauce, apple juice, apple pie, and so on.
Multiple experiences that engage multiple senses plant information deeply in the brain. And more, they engage the emotions that form opinions and judgments. Judgment poses the important question, “How do I feel about apples?” Whether the answer is love ’em or leave ’em, it’s the combination of tangible experiences and the formation of judgment that creates the child’s personal reality of apples. And once something is real, the child can then transfer it to related but unknown ideas, such as the letter A.
So when you think about early learning, remember, this. For kids, everything is learning!
