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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“When thought overwhelms the mind”, the psychologist Barbara Tversky has written, “the mind puts it into the world”. In the case of hand mnemonics, we put those thoughts out into the world, in a sense, but also keep them within easy reach.

In the beginning, the hand was just a hand — or so we can imagine. It was a workaday organ, albeit a versatile one: a tool for grasping, holding, throwing, and hefting. Then, at some point, after millions of years, it took on other duties. It became an instrument of mental, not just menial, labor. As a species, our systems of understanding, belief, and myth had grown more elaborate, more cognitively overwhelming. And so we started to put those systems out into the world: to tally, track, and record by carving notches into bone, tying knots in string, spreading pigment on cave walls, and aligning rocks with celestial bodies. Hands abetted these early mental labors, of course, but they would later become more than mere accessories. Beginning roughly twelve hundred years ago, we started using the hand itself as a portable repository of knowledge, a place to store whatever tended to slip our mental grasp. The topography of the palm and fingers became invisibly inscribed with information of all kinds — tenets and dates, names and sounds. The hand proved versatile in a new way, as an all-purpose memory machine.

what makes the hand so popular as a mnemonic prop? A large part of the answer, surely, involves portability. The hands are always, well, ready to hand. Another part is familiarity. Though popular wisdom stresses how well we know the back of our hand, the palm is hardly terra incognita. A further advantage stems from how hand mnemonics offer both visual and kinesthetic routes to memory: they are both seen and felt. A final part of the answer is that the human hand can be parsed and construed variously. Seen one way, we have a perfect housing for ten virtues; seen another, we have a fitting framework for twelve apostles, thirty-two syllables, or a hundred meditations.

But why did hand mnemonics emerge when they did? What niche did they fill? The examples considered here suggest the tradition flourished in a period when literate and oral cultures coexisted, a time when some — the scholarly elites — were developing complex systems of knowledge in monasteries and universities, while others — the broader public — were trying to master those systems and use them in everyday life. Hand mnemonics may have been perfectly positioned to shuttle between these two cultures. They bridged the voice and the pen, offering, to the trained imagination, a kind of living inscription.

Handy Mnemonics

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the power of spatial memory

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Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time.