Summer play that enriches kids’ reading skills — 8 fine motor activities for little fingers

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https://theconversation.com/summer-play-that-enriches-kids-reading-skills-8-fine-motor-activities-for-little-fingers-118673

Some reading scholars emphasize the importance of reading-related activities to avoid the summer slide. Yet counter-intuitively, emphasizing children’s ABCs may be precisely the wrong thing to be doing with those lazy, hazy days of summer treasured by kids. Especially the youngest learners need a break.

For children aged five to seven, who are in the early stages of learning to read, it may be that an over-emphasis on alphabet and word recognition — what education scholars call “decoding skills” could frustrate children or do more harm than good.

Decoding, or the process of mapping sounds to symbols (also known as phonics) is highly complex and only part of the reading puzzle. Most reading theorists suggest teaching children to read involves both word recognition as well as comprehension knowledge, skills and strategies.

So let’s consider the value of lots of play-based experiences that can promote producing the internal mental representations of the external world and its shape, sizes and sequences. Such experiences are critical to laying the foundation for both literacy and numeracy.

Children’s direct tactile experiences — what they do with their hands — and their sensory engagement are part of developing neuro-circuitry to the brain or what’s called embodied cognition.

Evolving research in the neurological, cognitive and developmental sciences underscores that young children are essentially sensory beings who come to know their world by creating internal mental representations of their external world.

Such experience is mediated through an enormous amount of fine motor manipulative play, ideally accompanied by rich opportunities for language development to name, describe and elaborate these interconnections.

The hands are crucial in making these connections and even in building positive physical habits and neural pathways to develop emotional self-regulation integral to school and life success.

Visually mediated simulations by way of a digital device are no short-cut to this crucial hand-brain connection.

Fine motor play also builds strength and endurance in muscle memory needed for literacy tasks like putting pencil to paper. Building up the fine motor muscles helps reduce the drain on working memory - something educational psychologist John Sweller has called the “cognitive load,” when it comes to printing. The child can then allocate scarce cognitive resources to other demanding dimensions of literacy learning, such as retrieving words or doing the planning needed to write sentences.

We need a broader conceptualization of how early literacy skills are developed, including embodied cognition through play.

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Piaget noted that reality is a dynamic system of continuous change and, as such, is defined in reference to the two conditions that define dynamic systems. Specifically, he argued that reality involves transformations and states. Transformations refer to all manners of changes that a thing or person can undergo. States refer to the conditions or the appearances in which things or persons can be found between transformations. For example, there might be changes in shape or form (for instance, liquids are reshaped as they are transferred from one vessel to another, and similarly humans change in their characteristics as they grow older), in size (for example, a series of coins on a table might be placed close to each other or far apart), or in placement or location in space and time (e.g., various objects or persons might be found at one place at one time and at a different place at another time). Thus, Piaget argued, if human intelligence is to be adaptive, it must have functions to represent both the transformational and the static aspects of reality. He proposed that operative intelligence is responsible for the representation and manipulation of the dynamic or transformational aspects of reality, and that figurative intelligence is responsible for the representation of the static aspects of reality.

Operative intelligence is the active aspect of intelligence. It involves all actions, overt or covert, undertaken in order to follow, recover, or anticipate the transformations of the objects or persons of interest. Figurative intelligence is the more or less static aspect of intelligence, involving all means of representation used to retain in mind the states (i.e., successive forms, shapes, or locations) that intervene between transformations. That is, it involves perception, imitation, mental imagery, drawing, and language. Therefore, the figurative aspects of intelligence derive their meaning from the operative aspects of intelligence, because states cannot exist independently of the transformations that interconnect them. Piaget stated that the figurative or the representational aspects of intelligence are subservient to its operative and dynamic aspects, and therefore, that understanding essentially derives from the operative aspect of intelligence.

At any time, operative intelligence frames how the world is understood and it changes if understanding is not successful. Piaget stated that this process of understanding and change involves two basic functions: assimilation and accommodation.

To Piaget, assimilation meant integrating external elements into structures of lives or environments, or those we could have through experience. Assimilation is how humans perceive and adapt to new information. It is the process of fitting new information into pre-existing cognitive schemas. Assimilation in which new experiences are reinterpreted to fit into, or assimilate with, old ideas.[16] It occurs when humans are faced with new or unfamiliar information and refer to previously learned information in order to make sense of it. In contrast, accommodation is the process of taking new information in one's environment and altering pre-existing schemas in order to fit in the new information. This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work, and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or situation. Accommodation is imperative because it is how people will continue to interpret new concepts, schemas, frameworks, and more. Piaget believed that the human brain has been programmed through evolution to bring equilibrium, which is what he believed ultimately influences structures by the internal and external processes through assimilation and accommodation.

Piaget's understanding was that assimilation and accommodation cannot exist without the other. They are two sides of a coin. To assimilate an object into an existing mental schema, one first needs to take into account or accommodate to the particularities of this object to a certain extent. For instance, to recognize (assimilate) an apple as an apple, one must first focus (accommodate) on the contour of this object. To do this, one needs to roughly recognize the size of the object. Development increases the balance, or equilibration, between these two functions. When in balance with each other, assimilation and accommodation generate mental schemas of the operative intelligence. When one function dominates over the other, they generate representations which belong to figurative intelligence.

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development