Podcasts cast light on early childhood development

Wanting to be up to date on information, I Googled Early Childhood Podcasts and was blown away. The number of choices was amazing. I perused the list, and opened “The Everything ECE Podcast.”

The interviewer, Carla West of the Early Childhood Academy was leading a discussion with Cheryl Lundy Swift, about kindergarten readiness. I highly recommend it for all parents and grandparents of young children.

Dr. Swift is the Director of the Professional Learning and Academic Partnership for Learning Without Peers, a program addressing the decline of readiness by preschool-aged children since the Pandemic; a ratio of 55 percent to 47 percent, a dramatic drop.

That means kindergarten teachers welcomed children who didn’t know the alphabet, could not write their names, didn’t know how to sit in a circle and pay attention, or play with other children. The pandemic had deprived them of the normal experiences that would have brought them up to speed.

Having been the director of a parent/child program for families with children from birth through three years old, I find this alarming. There is so much that children need to be exposed to during the first three years of life. Without that exposure, their brain is deprived of messages that stay with them for a lifetime and, even though they can be learned, skills that often fall behind if not addressed.

During the podcast social-emotional growth, phonetical awareness, play-based learning, literacy, and motor development were highlighted. Lack of exposure in all these areas are factors holding kids, born in late 2019 – 2022, back. The podcast emphasized many strategies that help eliminate this deficit. Everything suggested can be done with any young child by a parent, caregiver, or grandparent. They aren’t hard or take special training.

Modeling is one of the easiest things to accomplish. When setting the table, counting out the number of forks (while identifying them) teaches math and literacy. Reading aloud (from birth) produces sounds that later equate to spoken words and words on a page. Moving your finger under words and from the top of a page, downward, helps a young mind know that we read from left to right and top to bottom. Pointing out the names of letters and whether they are lower or upper case prepares a child to recognize them in their name. As they start to learn to write that name, starting at the top of the letter and moving your hand down gives a heads-up on how it is done. The podcast talked about the difficulty left-handed children have in learning to write in a right-handed society, and gave suggestions.

Much learning happens when we are aware of how we speak. When I take my dog for walks, I talk to him. This morning, as he tried to get a drink from yesterday’s puddle, now frozen, I said out loud, “What happened to the water?” If he had been a child, I would have encouraged an answer. Walking a little more I noticed his nose tracing a path around our yard and was reminded how deprived the children of the Pandemic were when not allowed to touch anything. Everything was off-limits because it would give them germs. Not only could they not learn by touch and textures, they developed anxieties about exploring and were discouraged from wondering about the world.

As his nose trailed in a new direction I asked, “Who was here last night? Was it the squirrel? I haven’t seen the squirrel all winter. Where do you think he has gone?”  If he had been a child, thinking could have happened, and resulted in a response. Keep in mind, “yes-or-no” questions require little thinking. Open-ended questions encourage thought and the give-and-take of dialogue.

The podcast talked about what was lost by the need to wear masks. Children learn language by sound, and by watching our mouths form words. That couldn’t happen during the pandemic.

A story was told of a kindergartener unable to hold a pencil or a crayon. Isolated from the modeling of peers, he never crawled, walking from the get-go. Without the developmental step of crawling, he hadn’t developed the shoulder muscles that would transfer skills to his fingers and allow the dexterity needed to hold a pencil.

Other fine motor skills were lost because of technology. Kids can click on keyboards yet may not know how to use scissors. Limiting screen time and encouraging cutting or even picking up items using kitchen tongs will help. Large motor skills were also affected by lack of movement; however, these can be built over time.

Programs called “Mat Time and Squawker” (a parrot puppet) were talked about in relation to play-based instruction and music. All of which left me wishing to be back in the classroom or, at least, have young grandchildren living nearby.