Early childhood education is the core of all future learning, and early literacy is its foundation. 

Educators, parents, and other stakeholders in the ECCE ecosystem know that one of the most critical tasks they face is developing fundamental language skills in children. This needs to be supported in the curriculum, which itself needs to work holistically, nurturing language, early numeracy, social, emotional, and cognitive development.

Fortunately, we have the perfect guide to help you navigate this task.

Our Roadmap To Early Literacy Development

Phase I: Understanding Foundational Skills

Phonological awareness: This is the ability to recognise and work with sounds in the spoken language. For example, a child that understands sounds of a language would know that PAN was made up of three sounds from P/A/N. Phonological awareness is the foundation for learning to read and is an important component of both reading and spelling. It is the ability to recognize and work with sounds in spoken language. This skill comes naturally to some young learners, many do need help honing these skills. This can be harnessed by increasing activities like singing and rhyming, and focusing on a few sounds at a time.

Print awareness: Children also need to learn that spoken words are represented by written symbols. Print awareness translates to alphabetic understanding. As children understand how to map individual sounds to the respective letters, they gradually begin to decode words. Young children should always be encouraged to scribble their thoughts down, whether they know how to write yet or not. They can represent their ideas via pictures, or even practice certain letters repeatedly. This exposure is crucial to developing a strong grasp of print awareness skills.

Vocabulary and concept development: This stage is predictive of future academic behaviour too, and is the most critical step on the foundational literacy pathway. Constant and regular exposure to reading material in their surroundings will benefit children; they face future years of schooling armed with a larger vocabulary and well-developed language skills.

Phase II: Creating Learning Environments

Language-rich environments: A groundbreaking study by Hart and Risley (1995) showed the amount and kind of language parents use with their young children is a strong predictor of important educational outcomes. Learning centres too can adopt this language-rich environment, providing frequent verbal interaction between young learners and their educators. For instance, simple storytelling sessions can serve multiple purposes. Reading stories out loud can teach children new vocabulary and sounds, they can be given opportunities to predict what comes next, and teachers can ask questions to extend children’s verbal responses. To enhance this experience, children need to connect their own background, culture, and experiences with the learning. They need context, and the learning needs to be localised to fit these needs.

Print-rich environments: A high-quality learning environment is, by its very nature, print-rich. Children have access to an array of different literature at all times. Schools and Anganwadis can increase exposure to print by:
– creating a schedule of the day on the board and encouraging children to read and follow it
– labelling everyday objects like the desk, blackboard, and walls in multiple common languages
– creating a library of multicultural books for children to read and even take home
– investing in multilingual and multi-modal digital tools that help children develop foundational reading skills

Scheduled Reading Time: This is one of the most important components on the road to early literacy development. Daily schedules should set aside at least 15 minutes a day for reading and reading-based activities. Books—digital and physical—should be read, then re-read for better comprehension. To increase engagement, children should be encouraged to participate in lively discussions, activities, and games based on the books.

*Stay tuned for a very special reading-themed article, complete with children’s book recommendations, coming to you next week.

Phase III: Developing Adult Literacy

Responsive skilled educators and Anganwadi workers: Our guidelines would be incomplete without our teachers, educators, Anganwadi workers, and their influence on early childhood education. Responsive caregivers are key components of a literacy-rich environment, engaging children in a variety of ways and adjusting their content delivery and communication to fit their learning needs. Such educators are well-equipped to deal with 21^st century classrooms and turn their students into the citizens of tomorrow.

Involved parents: Interventions at any level across the educational landscape need the support of parents. Partnerships with parents and guardians improve learning outcomes, and support in-school learning. As parents understand their role in their children’s education, early learning initiatives become stronger and much easier to conduct. At-home initiatives can then be undertaken to extend learning opportunities beyond classrooms and into homes. For instance, parents join hands with educators and Anganwadi workers to help children work on activity sheets, at-home activities, reading practice, and more.

A network of stakeholders: Quite like the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child,” an entire community of people must interact—and do it well—so children across grassroots in India have access to quality early education. A learning community where each stakeholder – parents, teachers, principals, administrators, Anganwadi workers, and more – can share and access relevant information at any time cultivates equal partnership between each person in this community. Eventually, an active learning community can help India build a robust and healthy early learning landscape.

Square Panda India is helping early readers and pre-readers transform into holistic learners using a multi-modal foundational literacy program backed by the latest neuroscience research. Learn more about us: ecce.squarepanda.in.

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Memory plays a key role in building a solid foundation for learning, both inside and outside the classroom. Retaining what they are taught helps children excel academically, score well on tests, and stay cognitively engaged throughout their lives. However, remembering everything we have learnt is not an ingrained skill, and it is something ECCE educators and Anganwadi workers need to develop with certain teaching strategies.

Why does the brain find it hard to remember?

How The Brain Is Wired To Forget

How Memory Works

Think of your mind like a spiderweb, with multiple connected neurons. 

Each time we learn something new, like when a child is introduced to a sock puppet for the first time, the brain turns this experience into a memory. The same neurons involved in making a memory are the ones involved in forgetting it. Once we understand this process, we can devise simple strategies to help us retain important pieces of knowledge. Each time we revisit a particular memory, our synapses are strengthened. Think of it as painting. Apply one coat of paint, and the colour is light. Another coat of paint makes it darker, and stays longer too. This phenomenon is called synaptic plasticity and explains why some memories stay for a lifetime while some fade away. 

Different memories are created differently. For someone literate in English, the word ORANGE is more memorable that SMAPTFIN. That is because our brains connected oranges to the smell of the fruit, the colour, and perhaps some distant childhood memory. That means the more connection you have to an experience, and thus your neurons, the stronger is the memory you make.

The Research Into Memory And Forgetting

Rote memorisation leads to a superficial grasp of learning and is quickly forgotten. 

This is something psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered in the 1880s. His studies showed that without reinforcement or connections to prior knowledge, information is quickly forgotten. He called this the forgetting curve, which was a measurement of how much we forget over time.

We lose roughly 56% of information in one hour, 66% after a day, and 75% after six days.

An article by neurobiologists Blake Richards and Paul Frankland counters Ebbinghaus’s theory. They purport that the goal of memory is to evaluate the purpose of each strand of memory, evaluating and potentially discarding information if it doesn’t promote our survival.

A scientific way to retain learning, then, is to increase children’s connections to as many things as possible. So, we are effectively widening the spiderweb in their minds. The following are the most effective learning strategies:

5 Teacher Strategies To Help Children Retain Learning

*can be repurposed for learning with parents too

• Regularly revisit learning: According to research (Carpenter et al., 2012; Kang, 2016), children perform better academically when they are given multiple opportunities to review learned material. Instead of moving on from a topic once your teaching is complete, recap the topic after periodic intervals. Another smart way to reinforce learning is to connect old topics with new ones. For example, the way Square Panda’s sequenced curriculum revisits key topics while adding layers of complexity to make sure learners are revising while learning.
• Break information down into bite-sized pieces: The shorter attention spans of your little learners means you have to space out the information you share with them. Teach them in small increments throughout the day, weaving learning with interactive games and active play. This way, children process the information much faster without having to sit still for longer periods, something that causes the dreaded ‘b’ word: boredom.
• Use multiple modes to deliver information: Use images to support the text you teach. Bring a plant to show colours of leaves, throw a ball to explain motion, collect pebbles to familiarise children with shapes and textures. It is easier to remember information when it is presented in different ways, and particularly so when visual aids are involved. Rather than rely on one mode of instruction, mix it up by adding multiple modes together.
• Use rhymes and songs: Human brains are wired to remember music, patterns, and sounds, and so, using music to teach can help increase recall in children. Create little songs and rhymes about the topic you are teaching, and encourage your students to do the same. For example, if you are talking about frogs, you can bring in an element of maths too by singing Five Little Speckled Frogs.
• Make learning fun: Using entertainment and games in learning has always been encouraged by early childhood education experts. Such instruction makes use of the child’s interest to teach them new concepts. Theoretical subjects are easier to follow, their creativity blooms, and they are actively engaged in learning. Educators and caregivers can take the aid of child-safe educational apps, finger puppets, musical instruments, stories, and more as they teach.

Even as we learn that children start to forget almost as soon as learning happens, there are certain evidence-based strategies to help reinforce learning and increase memory.

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“We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world.” – David Warlick

As educator and author David Warlick reminds us, technology is permeating every sphere, and it has the potential to revolutionise learning as we know it. Bringing Information and Communication Technologies (or ICT) into the classroom can lead to greater developmental outcomes. Research shows structured exposure to thoughtfully constructed and well informed choices of technology supports young learners in many aspects of learning – language development and development of mathematical thinking. It also provides an opportunity for children with special needs to explore information on their own or with a little support from adults.

What Are The Benefits Of Using Technology In Education?

To keep up with the changing pace of education and to gain 21^st century skills, technology needs to be interwoven into the early curriculum. As children live in a world dominated by technology and digitisation, we need to adapt our teaching styles to how they want to learn. Here are some key advantages to using ICT in education.

• Increased student engagement, as evidenced by research
• Technology can penetrate far-flung geographical regions, increasing access and promoting equitable learning
• Educators and caregivers find it easier to track and monitor children’s performance when they are using technology
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have taken ICT to a new level; adaptive, personalised instruction enhances technology offerings
• Taking certain manual tasks online means teachers spend less time on paperwork
• At its core and used effectively, ICT builds a bridge between students of different learning levels

The History Of ICT In Indian Education

June 1923
India’s first brush with ICT in education came with a radio broadcast by the Radio Club of Mumbai.

The 1930s
The BBC aired educational and cultural programs in India through broadcast radio.

1937
All India Radio broadcasted educational programs for school children.

1961
Educational Television (ETV), a pilot project by UNESCO and the Ford Foundations, was introduced in secondary schools in Delhi.

1984
For the first time in India, computers were used for education, in the Computer Literacy and Studies in School (CLASS) project.

2002
Gyan Vani, an educational radio station for all learners, including adults, came on air.

December 2004
The concept of ICT is introduced in schools.

2010
The Central Government revised this concept to include secondary school students too.

2020
The National Education Policy highlights the need for a dedicated unit to develop digital infrastructure and digital content, and increase India’s ICT-based educational initiatives.

*sources: Agrawal, 2005; Mohanty, 1984; NEP 2020

Leading early childhood experts have been studying the effect of the pandemic and subsequent disruption in learning. According to the UNESCO-UNICEF-World Bank survey on National Education responses to Covid-19 school closures, television-based remote learning policies have the potential to reach the highest proportion of students (62%), which amounts to almost 930 million students worldwide. Stakeholders across the Indian educational ecosystem have been tapping into this opportunity, leveraging technology like TV and radio to reach a larger subset of the student population.

A UNICEF report on India mentions, “School closures have impacted 247 million children enrolled in elementary and secondary education and 28 million children enrolled in pre-schools and Anganwadi centers. This is in addition to the more than 6 million girls and boys who were already out of school before the Covid-19 crisis.” 

Recognising how the school closures could lead to a devastating learning loss, pandemic-driven ICT initiatives took learning from the classroom into homes around India.

ICT-Driven Initiatives Across India

BY GOVERNMENTS

Chhattisgarh: The state’s dense forest cover impedes its ability to digitally connect with all young learners. To overcome this, the state launched multiple initiatives during the lockdown. They started local classes called ‘Padhai Tuhar Para’, during which study material was shared via Bluetooth. They even crowdsourced content from teachers, NGOs, and other content development firms at zero cost.

Kerala: This government launched virtual classes through their educational television channel called Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE), which had launched in 2005. This government had already digitally linked classes – even primary classes – well before the pandemic hit, and transitioning online was relatively seamless.

Maharashtra: The Government of Maharashtra partnered with the Department of School Education and UNICEF (only technical support) to keep learning going. Their program – named The Learning from Home Package – comprises educational content from various technological platforms like TV, radio, and the internet, and is shared daily with parents and children to ensure even the most vulnerable receive educational support. 

Madhya Pradesh: This state envisioned a new learning initiative called DigiLEP, integrating digital learning with classroom teaching in the post-Covid era, using one of the most widely used phone apps – WhatsApp. 

*These initiatives make these states the perfect launching pad for the World Bank’s STARS project, which will provide USD 500 million to the governments of Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha and Rajasthan, to support and strengthen the quality of school education.

BY ORGANISATIONS, NGOS, & INDIVIDUALS

SmarterED Platform by Lenovo: The technology company partnered with Vidyalaya, a non-profit, to enable volunteer teachers to educate young students from grades 5 to 12.

School-to-Home by Square Panda India: Square Panda’s ‘School-to-Home’ program recognises the importance of keeping the learning going and is extending education beyond school boundaries. Using blended learning and AI based technology, our system allows children to learn and improve their literacy skills even when they are physically distant from schools. Additionally, teachers can stay connected to students’ learning and build a partnership with parents too.

Individual Efforts By Educators And Anganwadi Workers: Adding to the national, international, and local efforts are the bravehearts fighting to deliver learning – our educators and Anganwadi workers. Meet some inspiring folks innovating during the learning crisis, here.

Challenges To Integrating ICT In Education

• Usage of technology is subject to its availability. This digital availability is intermittent at best across multiple regions in India, although measures have been taken to shore up these access gaps.
• Integrating technology into preschool and early education requires the presence of skilled educators and facilitators who can deal with issues as they crop up. Training teachers in ever-evolving technologies, regularly upgrading their skills, and keeping them informed of the latest developments and best practices is a Herculean task.
• Learning centres need the latest hardware and software for effective integration of digital technology. Setting up such facilities needs large investments on the part of the educational institutions and governments.
• Without guidance and effective integration, ICT has the potential to turn active engagement into passive use, affecting children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development.

3 Strategies To Incorporate ICT In Early Education

1. Continuous Training & Assistance For Educators: The involvement of educators and caregivers is critical to the success of technology integration in early learning centres.  Teachers need skilling in ICT to understand how technology can be used as a lesson delivery platform to present information to children. Additionally, regular training can overcome the initial resistance to technology in the classroom, and constant support serves to give educators more confidence as they use technology to drive learning outcomes.
2. Public-Private Partnerships (PPP): Leveraging private organisation funds and technology in public schools can solve accessibility issues and raise infrastructure support across grassroots. The public sector will also benefit from the constant innovation and security protocols that are in place in such private entities.
3. Create Blended Or Hybrid Learning Centres: This model combines new-age technology with traditional methods of learning to get best results out of both. For example, traditionally, a teacher would use flashcards, story books, and puppets to tell a story. New dimensions can be added using a digital drawing board, or even by an app that makes sounds to enhance storytelling time.
   *Read our expert suggestions on how to set up blended classrooms easily.

Square Panda India & ICT

At Square Panda, we recognise the importance of equipping educators with technological know-how. Our educator empowerment programs include basic training about ICT, where we include topics about cyber safety and age-appropriate digital tools too. Our aim is to empower educators and help them use various tools and platforms effectively for teaching and learning, which in turn improves their professional development. Our programs are built to shape the future of our nation by transforming the way educators teach.

Square Panda India MD, Ashish Jhalani, remarks that “Many young children are first time technology users. Even before the pandemic increased edutech usage in schools, we saw how digital literacy improved over just a short time with our program. Children went from having no exposure to digital tools to being able to use tablets and mobile apps with ease. All this apart from the foundational literacy skills these children picked up.”

How do you use technology for teaching and learning in early childhood education? Comment below.

Did you know that becoming literate in any language does not come naturally to young children?

A study done by UNESCO in 2012 states that approximately 250 million school-aged children across the globe hadn’t learnt how to read. Studies also show that the ability of kids to finish their education successfully is highly correlated to their ability to read proficiently by third grade. If this is not achieved, it is very difficult for children to catch up in later years.

As the internet revolution sweeps the world, developing a reading habit has never been more important. Inculcating this reading habit starts early on, and is often taught alongside other essential cognitive skills. The surface understanding is simple. Young learners are introduced to letters and their sounds. Their exposure to the language grows in complexity as they move from one level to the next, learning words, then sentences, and finally developing some level of literacy in that language.

We recognise the efforts educators make towards this goal, and have done our best to deliver a deeper understanding of the neuroscience behind developing foundational literacy skills in early childhood. We researched reading and its effect on the early brain, and this is what we learnt: 

Neuroplasticity And Its Impact On The Reading Brain

• One of the most important findings in neuroscience research has been ‘neuroplasticity’, which is the ability of the brain to change and form new connections as it learns new things. These very changes are responsible for people learning to read. In fact, neuroplasticity is said to be the basis of all learning.

How It Begins:

• As a child is born, their brains form small connections with each new experience, which gradually turn into neural pathways. If unused, these connections soon disappear. However, this little learner’s brain does not automatically know how to read, because from an evolutionary point of view, the writing system is relatively new (the first writing system came about only around 5000 years ago, which is ‘new’ in evolutionary terms; the brain never needed to adapt to the task of reading). The reading skill is, as a result, an acquired one which requires many years of practice. This is where neuroplasticity kicks in, by helping teach a brain how to read. That is also why early education experts recommend reading stories to babies as young as six months of age, to enhance their neural connections.

To Preschoolers…

• Studies conducted on the reading brain show that the best impact happens when reading instruction is given to learners at the preschool and kindergarten level. 
• In fact, focusing on the phonology of a language before teaching early learners the language has a bigger impact on their future education. When educators teach children to recognise letters and words, they are helping them grow new functional regions in their brain.

And Finally, To Practiced Readers:

• When a child is learning to read, what he/she is trying to do is, taking sounds of the language represented in the auditory cortex (the part of the head above the ears), and mapping it to symbols in the visual cortex (the lowest part at the back of the head). This joins together to connect and form a word. That’s why reading is a circuit; it is not a specific area of the brain. When the brain does this again and again and again, it begins to behave like a muscle. Thus, today, when you are able to read effortlessly, it is because your brain has mastered how to map these symbols and sounds together. As a consequence, over a period of time, children might start out as being auditory learners, but eventually become visual learners.

Connecting Speech To The Written Word

Before we learn how to read, words are just meaningless scribbles on a page. They are objects we don’t naturally know or come into contact with, unlike the spoken word. Every child learns to speak before they can read. He/she is exposed to vocabulary by the adults around them on a constant basis. Unfortunately, there is no link between the spoken word, and the written word (or print concepts). So far, words were the initial mode of communication for kids, and when schooling starts, suddenly, they are told that these little symbols (individual letters) are the new mode of communication. They now have to reorganize their brain to match the words to a writing system. What children try to do, as they begin to read, is figure out how to connect the words heard with the written symbols they can see.

Note: Like muscle memory, a young child’s brain slowly makes the connection between the auditory form and the visual form, and the child is now reading. That is also how an auditory learner turns into a visual learner.

Reading And The Indian Brain

• Early learners in India are the only ones in the world who learn two writing systems simultaneously–the Roman/Latin writing system (for e.g. English) and the Devanagari (for e.g. Hindi, Marathi) writing system. As a child becomes a practised reader, a specific part of their brain becomes associated with recognising letter strings, often called the ‘visual word-form area’. In adult Indians who are skilled readers of two writing systems, we find two ‘visual word-form areas’.
• Children take longer to read Indian writing systems than they do English, because of the challenges these systems pose for them – complex script, multiple writing systems, and more. Additionally, when children learn a language, in the beginning, it is the spoken word that communicates meaning. Once they start formal schooling, they are told that they have to use little symbolic representations (a.k.a. letters); now those are the relevant units for communicating.

In a study conducted by cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Nandini Chatterjee Singh, a school whose primary mode of instruction was Hindi saw much better overall results in its students than a school which taught primarily in English. This is because the early exposure of understanding word sounds in Hindi transferred to English. Her study found that gains from teaching children their native language first might be slower, but has a much bigger impact.

The above evidence proves that an Indian educator’s job is doubly hard – they are trying to inculcate lifelong reading skills into just-developing brains; plus, evolution has not caught up to them yet. Additionally, their students are being introduced to two or more languages simultaneously. 

Now that you know how much of an effort reading takes and what an achievement it is, how proud will you be when your students learn new words? Stay tuned for new articles on early reading, early literacy, and Square Panda India, and visit ecce.squarepanda.in for information on our teaching-learning programs that focus on building a more literate India.