Ready 4 Learning Foundation Skills

I attended PL with Clarity Education on supporting children to be ready for formal learning at school.

Key points:

• Children are school ready but not curriculum ready.  The curriculum is being done to children whether they are ready or not.

• There are key foundation skills in hearing, seeing, moving and speaking that need to be developed first before formal learning.

• This information and assessment tool has been created out of current research.

• The key competencies are foregrounded in this tool.

• Phonological awareness is extremely important to have so children access the curriculum.

• The focus is on credit, rather than deficit by using I can statements. 

The most important point for me is that these skills can be developed in a play based environment.  This focus, along with tracking and other documentation could be the link that ERO might look for to support the importance of play in the classroom. 

Ready 4 Learning Foundation Skills:

How many times have children entered your classroom and they cannot sit still on the mat, they are unable to hold a pencil correctly or have difficulty recalling the letter name, sounds or sight words?

Do your learners have the fine motor dexterity needed for writing? 

Can they isolate and “hear” sounds in words?

How do you know if your learners are ready to learn the alphabet sounds or sight words?

Are they ready for the complex, abstract thinking required for some aspects of numeracy?

How do you know when your learners are ready to access the curriculum?

What do you need to ‘do’ to support your learners to be ready to access the curriculum?

We all know and recognise those children who are ‘not ready’ not developmentally ready or equipped for our very structured New Zealand Curriculum and early years school system.

It is important to develop a transition to school from home and ECE that supports learners to be working within their zone of proximal development in their first year(s) of school. Learning readiness’ involves knowing a child’s level of neurodevelopment and whether their various sensory-motor systems such as vision, hearing, touch, smell, balance, and sense of body in space are functioning well enough to support learning.  

Research has shown that if one or more of these areas are not functioning as they should, a child will find learning difficult and stressful, resulting in seemingly simple tasks causing tiredness, anxiety, distress and learned helplessness. 

We participated in extensive research and trials to create a Readiness for Learning Framework that supports and underpins the “foundation elements” needed for a learner to be curriculum ready, as  higher level cognitive tasks such as reading and writing are dependent upon the successful execution of fundamental skills and related tasks, many of which are motor tasks. If these skills are not automatic, the brain will concentrate on those rather than on the higher level thinking tasks.  In most cases,  a child has to learn these foundational skills in order to be able to start formal learning.

These elements consist of speaking, concepts of print, hearing, seeing and moving (fine/gross motor skills). In this framework, we gain an insight into what skills/elements the child needs to have in order for them to gain automaticity in their ability to read/write and carry out abstract thinking needed for maths.  Underpinning the framework are our all-important Key Competencies in child speak which can be tracked alongside their ready for learning skills.

To support this framework, we have developed an ‘assessment tool’ which is extremely easy and quick to administer, that allows teachers to ascertain whether students are curriculum ready and in what specific areas the required pre-curriculum subskills of listening, speaking, moving, seeing, and print are undeveloped. It is important for teachers to know their learner to enable them to provide specific targeted teaching which can take place in either a learning through play environment or a more ‘traditional’ classroom.   

Our Ready 4 Learning foundation skills framework and assessment tool are research-based using a variety of sources including occupational therapy, speech and language therapy, neurology and pediatric medicine as well as a globally recognised child developmental screening tool.

https://www.clarityeducation.co.nz/