intheKNOW
Books before
Video Games.
It’s Possible!
With the number of video games, apps, and television programmes
grabbing children’s attention these days, it’s hard to get them to
sit down with a book. Yet reading remains an essential component to any child’s development and their long-term prospects. To
help parents understand how children’s brains work, and how to
get them to take on a positive attitude to learning, we spoke to
Brian Caswell, the Dean of Research and Program Development for
MindChamps. He is the brainchild behind their Reading and Writing Programme and is a former teacher, parent, grandparent, author and expert in child psychology.
intheKNOW
In our exclusive interview, we asked him more about children’s
learning processes, the value of fictional novels, and the new-age
methods offered by MindChamps that don’t just teach your child
how to read, but spark a life-long love for reading in them.
Q: How do children learn before the age of 6?
A: In the first 6 years, the brain is developing the foundations upon
which everything else is built. What the neuroscience, psychology and
the educational research is showing, is that little kids don’t learn from
instruction. You can tell them something, but it doesn’t stick. They o nly
learn from experience or doing something that is hands-on. They’re
what I call sensory-emotional learners, meaning they learn by their 5
senses and their emotional response to it. Kids don’t analyse, they put
together things and see what happens. They learn from making mistakes, until they figure out how the thing works. And it’s the same with
language. Children learn language by using it. By being in a room where
language is used, and by interacting with the language. They don’t learn
by being told.
Q : What is your view on parents putting their pre-school child
through tuition at an early age to give them a ‘competitive
edge’?
A: People think if I start my child earlier, they’re going to have an advan-
tage. I’m going to give them an edge. But that doesn’t work. The brain
is ready for certain things at certain times. And reading is one of those
things you can’t really master before the age of 5 or 6. Which is why they
don’t try in the education system. It is parents who try to teach their kids
to read at the age 3. The problem with that is that there are only certain
elements of the reading process that you can do at age 3. One is pattern-
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recognition, but that’s not actually reading. You can get them to appear
to be reading, but you can’t get them to read.
Q: How do stress and negative emotions affect children’s ability to learn?
A: Learning is about emotion as much as it’s about anything else. One of
the key understandings to learning is that everything we process goes
through our emotions. Every sensory input goes in through the limbic
system (which is the emotions), and gets held in the emotions until
some sort of connection or understanding is made. Then it gets stored
in the brain matter as a memory. Because of that, everything that we
learn and store has attached to it an emotional resonance. So if I learn to
read in a state of anxiety and confusion and anger, then I feel that every
time I go to read! Therefore you become a reluctant student. If your aim
is to create a lifelong learner, the last thing you want to do is attach a
negative emotion to whatever they’re doing.
Q: How does reading literature help one develop skills for the
real world?
A: The reason we want kids to be readers, is not so they can decode stuff
later on, and read reports and contracts. That’s one of the purposes but
not the main one. The successful people of the future will be creative
and imaginative problem solvers. And you learn that from literature. All
literature is about solving problems. You create a crisis for the character,
and the character has to respond to that crisis, and it forms a desire or a
need. The story is, when they get to the end do they achieve the desire?
Or do they fail? So when kids get into books, they start predicting, and
they start problem solving.
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