Childcare facilities may overlook childrens’ cognitive spoken language and social-emotional skills development with the other early-skills children must learn, according to a recent piece in Canada’s ‘The Castlegar Source’ newspaper.
When children learn and practice early social skills like turn-taking, sharing and interaction, with hand-eye coordination and early physical development, their exposure to rich, spoken language may ‘stall’ as their attention goes elsewhere.
Knowing that children with hearing issues need constant spoken language-learning potential, especially outside the home – what can we do? One solution is to emphasise linguistic skills at the age of two to five, with childrens’ ability to learn cognitive language and social-emotional skills peaking at this time.
Check this chart with the four communication options for children. With hearing-devices and directed verbal interactions from under one year of age, most deaf childrens’ verbal skills will be similar to their hearing peers. Again, teaching approach will vary, based on a child’s communication option.
Teachers at a quality creche or preschool will interact with the children in rich, verbal and varied conversations that require creative thinking and responses. Ideally, the children will acquire a larger spoken vocabulary by kindergarten, which in turn strengthens their reading and expressive skills before school starts.
Stories and songs linked to pictures and activities are one approach, as are objects and props to trigger the childrens’ curiosity. Play-acting is the ideal way to step into a new character and stretch a child’s imagination – which is fuelled in the first place by reading story-books and story-telling together.
More Reading
- Home-Preschool Supports: A Mum’s Positive Story
- Question: Can A Deaf Child Participate At Creche?
- Visual Learning In The Preschool & Primary Years (PDF file)
- Bilingual, Spoken Language At Home And School
- Creche/Preschool Environments
- Classroom Technology ‘Has The Children Talking’
- Deaf Children ‘Can Learn Their Family Language’
- After A Cochlear Implant – The Real Work Begins
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