This article will discuss important strategies for getting the most from the early childhood education experience. Schools impact the lives of children as early as pre-kindergarten or kindergarten.The habits children learn early will carry them far into the future. The primary grades teach the basics of language arts, compilation, and experimentation with educational toys, as well as practical everyday skills.
The early grades can do more than just impart knowledge. Schools can cover basic life skills like good manners, putting things away when finished, how to eat with a fork or knife, how to delegate chores, how to arrive on time, listening skills, small group participation, and how to make a bed. Yes, orderliness, cooperation, and attentiveness to detail can be imparted early.
Perhaps the best time to learn language structure is in the primary grades. Language software companies like Pimsleur and other institutes teach that languages have building-block words, a core vocabulary that is finite and discernible. The challenge for new language learners is to hear the core of the language spoken until it becomes second nature.
This approach and similar ones like Rosetta Stone and Berlitz should be phased into the curriculum to teach language arts in the primary grades so that all children begin at the same starting point and build language using common instruction modules. This approach incrementally introduces new language learners to a total immersion in the context of everyday life situations. What better place to teach the context of language than in early education?
New language learners can learn the basics of a language in as little as 10 days. If this is the experience in language learning institutes, why not adopt this language teaching methodology throughout the educational system? Children would benefit by learning a native or foreign language thoroughly from a common starting point.
Language is not the only subject taught in the primary grades. Children should internalize life skills which will carry forward throughout formal schooling into later life.
The first life skill to be learned is to set boundaries so that formal schooling can be instilled through homework, practice, and devoting time to mastering basic skills. When children leave the confines of school, they enter a world that places demands upon their spare time. Children need to budget and prioritize time so that the full cycle of education can be mastered both at school and in the home. This aspect of learning will require parental involvement.
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