If ever there’s a time that human beings require the most conducive learning environments, it would be the starting five years of life. In fact, the most rapid brain development occurs during the first three years.
A wide variety of developmental aspects are involved in the early years of a child’s life, which include: cognitive, emotional, linguistic, social and motor development. This is why any learning environment should provide a situation that fosters development of all such aspects.
You can easily tell how fast kids are learning when you consider their acquisition of new words, usually starting from the 15th to 18th month period. Such rapid language learning would go on to the preschool years, after starting in childcare programmes.
Fostering Kids’ Learning Through A Conducive Learning Environment
Multiple senses are responsible for the growth and development of little children. These include the sense of sight, touch, taste, smell and sound.
Understanding the internal physiological processes behind a child’s learning experiences would help you get a better grasp of how the environment influences such learning. For every stimuli perceived by a child’s senses, a neural connection is made within the brain. As the child goes through more and more experiences, further neural connections are made. This has the overall effect of shaping your child’s thought processes, feelings, behaviours and learning.
What caregivers and parents need to keep in mind at all times, is the fact that the experiences of a human being during the childhood years don’t just affect such a person during those early years, but also have a far-reaching influence on the persons’ future adult life. Hence, only professionally trained caregivers are capable of properly handling the task of giving good care to your child.
All professional care givers know that their role isn’t just simply to develop a child’s mental and motor capacities, but also to develop a close bond with such a child. This close relationship is critically important in fostering mental development in young children. Indeed, such simple things as playing with the child or singing, speaking and reading to him/ her are what help the child’s brain grow.
What Benefits The Child Gets From A Conducive Learning Environment
Many abilities of any ordinary human being can be enhanced simply by having a good early learning experience. Some of these abilities include:
– The capacity to be a better learner in future. Someone who has had a very good foundational experience during childhood would be better placed to have good mental health in adult life, based on a 2007 early-years study by the Council of Early Child Development in Canada.
– Greater self-confidence and higher self-esteem stem from having a loving, caring and supportive environment in childhood.
– Being more socially adept is a benefit you would derive from proper early learning experiences, which would set you up for greater advancement in life.
– Initiating and maintaining successful relationships in adult life goes hand-in-hand with having better social skills.
– A person who has had a good foundation in early life would also have an even greater capacity to show empathy to others.