India’s diverse heritage has done more than culturally enrich us; it has also gifted us with a bilingual, and often multilingual population. Across the hinterland, many children hear multiple languages and dialects since birth, and are better equipped to develop literacy skills in those languages. 

Despite these favourable factors, fluency and literacy in second language acquisition is not at peak levels considering our exposure. This article delves into the factors that affect second language acquisition.

Factors Influencing Acquisition Of A Second Language

Student Characteristics

Age: An early learner’s brain is most equipped to deal with language literacy, as this study by Dr. Paul Thompson shows. This UCLA neurology professor and his team studied the brain scans of children between the ages of three and fifteen to map the growth and brain development, and found that the systems of the brain that control language acquisition grow rapidly from the age of six till puberty. Additionally, a younger brain processes much less data and information than an adult brain. Quite simply, they use fewer and simpler words and do not struggle to put abstract thought into words. These young learners are picking up the language gradually, and not simply ‘learning’ it; this makes a prodigious difference in language learning.

Motivation: The bigger the goal—speak to friends and relatives, get accepted into a certain school—the higher the motivation students have to study a language. Moreover, their enjoyment of the learning process influences their level of literacy in that language. For young children, positive feedback, constant encouragement, and fun educational tools work as motivation, and can make the difference between becoming simply ‘good’ versus becoming fluent.

Attitude: How have the children been introduced to the language and the culture behind it? What do you know about this language? A child’s attitude towards a language—greatly influenced by parents, caregivers, and teachers—plays a pivotal role in language acquisition. The more positive an attitude adults display towards a language, the more inclined children would be to learn said language.

Gender Differences: Male and female children differ in their verbal abilities, with multiple studies confirming superior language performance in females. These differences have been confirmed not only for the native languages, but also for the acquisition of a second language. While these differences decrease with age, during the first years of life, girls acquire language faster than boys and exhibit a larger vocabulary. Studies prove this pattern is repeated in comprehension, production, and even lexical and grammatical development. For instance, boys develop and produce word combinations (like ‘drink + water’) three months later than girls. Mixed classes sometimes make little allowance for this fact, and result in the girls overshadowing the boys’ accomplishments. Language experiences need to reflect these differences, as we encourage both genders to master new communication and language skills.

External Factors

Learning Environments: Young learners find it more difficult to pick up a language when they are not supported by a language-rich environment, both at home and in school (or in the Anganwadi). The sessions need to be engaging and full of playful elements. Activities for language learning need to be based on everyday experiences, to help children associate them correctly. Allowances must be made for mistakes, without any negative feedback. Adult support can be linked to simple dialogues and commentaries with children with open-ended questions to encourage conversation.

Native Language Proficiency: Children start learning their home or native language almost as soon as they are born. In fact, they apply the same strategies used for grasping contextual clues in their home language, while learning the second language. Depending on the frequency of exposure to new words and concepts in the native language, they develop stronger and better grasping strategies that are then transferred to the new language as well. Viewing each child’s native language as an asset and encouraging children to maintain and further develop their native language proficiency helps them become more fluent in the second language.

Instruction: Educators, teachers, and caregivers who are trained to teach a language holistically see better results with their students’ language acquisition skills. Such empowered teachers provide needed language support and explicit language instruction that takes into account students’ proficiency in other languages. Their own expertise enables them to plan language instruction to ensure student learning in incremental stages, for better outcomes.

Research clearly suggests language acquisition should be treated as a barometer of success. A weak language foundation has a domino effect on other areas of the child’s life as well, including cognitive and academic domains. Our task as educators and early learning experts includes providing children with appropriate holistic resources for language acquisition, right from the early ages.

See how Square Panda India lives up to the task via our Aarambh initiative: ecce.squarepanda.in.

The famous Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori once said, “Play is the work of the child”.

For young children, play is natural. Therefore, play-based learning feels natural to them too. Thus, play-rich environments become the single most important learning environment in early childhood education.
For more about play-based learning and its benefits, read our article on How Children Learn Through Play.

Today’s article shows how everyday items can be turned into playtime resources for foundational skill development.

*These games can be played in home or school environments.

Name: Seven Stones (Lagori)
Nature: Outdoor game; needs more than two players
History of the game: Lagori is an ancient Indian game—at least 5000 years old—that is now played in many countries around the globe.
Skills developed: Counting, fine and gross motor skills, strategy, teamwork

Name: Four Stones (Nalugu Rallu Aata)
Nature: Outdoor game; needs five players
History of the game: Another ancient Indian game, Four Stones was played in many rural districts of Andhra Pradesh until the 1960s and 1980s. Unfortunately, the popularity of this game has waned over the years. The origins of this game are also a mystery.
Skills developed: Communication (verbal and non-verbal), strategy, team spirit, social behaviour, reflexes, gross motor skills

Name: Chain (Sakli)
Nature: Outdoor game; needs more than two players
History of the game: The rules of this game probably evolved from the Western game ‘Tag’. Labelled ‘Chain Tag’ in English, Sakli is listed as a ‘traditional outdoor game on the verge of extinction’ by multiple sources.
Skills developed: Alertness, patience, caring, social emotional development, gross motor skills

Name: Hopping (Langdi Taang or Langdi)
Nature: Outdoor or indoor game; can be played individually (by asking children to ‘catch’ a hidden toy or object)
History of the game: Langdi originated during the Pandya Dynasty—also called the Pandyas of Madurai—from 6th to 14th Century C.E. Back then, this sport was called ‘Nondiyaattam’. Sports players consider Langdi to be the foundation of all sports, and the official field sport version is very useful when training for sports like kho kho, volleyball, and gymnastics.
Skills developed: Gross motor skills, balance, strengthen legs, small and large muscle development

Name: Five Stones
Nature: Indoor game; can be played individually
History of the game: This game appears in multiple civilizations since ancient times. Played by children globally, this game has many names — ashyk, jjagebatgi, anju kal, five stones, jackstones, etc. The Indian version of the game usually uses stones, although any similar sized object will suffice. After all, the Ancient Greek version of the game was played using the ankle bones of the sheep (these were called ‘knuckle bones’).
*Recommended for older children aged 5-10.
Skills developed: Dexterity, fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, reflexes, helps in focusing

Name: Tossing A Paper Ball
Nature: Indoor game; needs more than two players
History of the game: We do not know when paper began being used as replacements for balls, but the game of tossing a paper ball has proven effects in the classroom, with multiple modifications as per the age of the students’.
Online Modification: Children can create paper balls, and toss them at the screen, in the direction of their classmates, while naming any one. That child then repeats this motion, and the game moves on until each child has a chance to call out a classmate’s name.
Skills developed: Fine motor skills, memory retention, gross motor skills

Multiple research studies over the years have proven the efficacy of play in enhancing social and emotional development—apart from other foundational skills—in early childhood. Hear Square Panda Thursdays host and early years’ stalwart, Ms. Sonia Relia, speak about how play enhances these skills. As Ms. Relia says, “The day you cannot play with your students is the day you stop working in early years.”

Watch this space for more ECCE-related resources, activities, and educational content.
Learn more about Square Panda’s experiential play-based foundational program, at https://ecce.squarepanda.in/program.

Well before infants can understand any words, for example, they find speech interesting to listen to, and prefer it to other kinds of sounds (Shultz & Vouloumanos, 2010).

Phonics, at its very core, is the method applied to teach people how to read and write an alphabetic language using sounds. 

Phonics has been around for a long time, and is one of the most recommended methods of teaching in schools, especially in Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE). In fact, American President Benjamin Franklin even attempted to create his own alphabet to replace the existing one.

This article answers the most common questions about phonics and related terms, its use in Indian schools, and how it can be used in the classroom.

What does the term ‘phonics’ actually mean?

Phonics helps teachers and educators develop reading skills in children by linking sounds in a language to the letters and words that represent them. Phonics instruction has a profound impact on young learners’ brains and studies have even shown its effectiveness over other teaching methods.

What are some common terms related to phonics?

Phonological Awareness: This is the awareness of the sound structure of any language. Children can recognise and work with any sound of the spoken language once they develop phonological awareness. For e.g., they can pick out words that rhyme, break up a sentence into words, and more.

Phonemic Awareness: This is the ability to notice and work with individual sounds (or phonemes) in spoken language. For e.g., blending sounds to make words, breaking up words into individual sounds, and more.

Why is phonics so important in early childhood?

Sounding out words becomes easier: Phonics breaks down words into components, helping children ‘read’. Over time, they can even recognise patterns in words and automatically learn to read them correctly.

Links sounds and letters: As the phonics method uses sounds to link to respective letters or letter groups, children know exactly which sound should be produced for each letter or letter group, making the reading process simpler.

Long words become easier to read: Unlike when children learn a language via complete words, phonics breaks down longer words into individual sounds. Young children eventually learn to break down (and read) any long word into sounds even if they do not understand its meaning.

Children gain secondary skills: While phonics primarily aims to develop the reading skill, children also simultaneously learn to think logically (as they read words they don’t understand), and pick up writing skills (during spelling-related phonics exercises).

Why must we ‘teach’ sounds?

Even as children automatically pick up sounds since birth, they are not completely equipped to process the information on their own. For example, children would not automatically know that ‘MAT’ and ‘MAP’ begin with the same sound, or that ‘PAN’ and ‘DAD’ have the same sound of ‘a’. This suggests that children need to know how sounds map to a written system, and for this, they need explicit phonics instruction.

Why not simply teach children to read? Won’t that help them map sounds to written words? 

Being read to is another crucial aspect of foundational learning, but it cannot replace phonics instruction. A study by Evans & Saint-Aubin in 2005 showed that as children were being read to from a storybook, they spent much longer looking at pictures than reading the words or text. It is not realistic to expect young children to learn much about mapping sounds and written words simply from being read to.

How does phonics work in Indian languages?

Most Indian languages are ‘pure phonic languages’, i.e., the word sounds exactly like it is written. Plus, every sound has a specific written representation which does not change. For example, Hindi and Marathi use a Devanagari script, and the sound of each alphabet in this language is distinctly different. अ remains the same pronunciation, whether the word is अनार or अक्षर.

While only a small percentage of Indian schools focus on phonics and related activities at present, this method of instruction has been highly recommended for ECCE in the recently released NIPUN document and the National Education Policy (or NEP 2020), for all languages.

Can phonics be included as a small part of each lesson?

Sounds are already a part of every lesson, and there are quick tricks educators and teachers can use to leverage this for a revision lesson. For example, after a story session, children can count the syllables in each word, they can rhyme with numbers (one-sun), and even simply sound out letters they have learnt previously.

Can parents also help with phonics instruction?

The home environment is crucial to develop holistic foundational skills, say experts. The role of parents in fostering their children’s development is twofold: they introduce children to sound, and play a crucial part in reinforcing teachers’ instructions. Parents can be given a list of words and stories introduced in school, which they can repeat with the children during daily chores and activities. Parents can also ask questions about further letter sound knowledge, like ‘What is the beginning sound of this word?’ or ‘What is the last letter in this word, and what sound does it make?’ Parents unfamiliar with the language can listen to songs and rhymes in the language of instruction with their children, and encourage their little ones to sing along.

What sort of activities can help children develop phonemic awareness? 

Simple letter identification activities can be turned into phonic games, by asking children to also sound out the letter. In the same way, sorting activities can be grouped as per rhymes, syllables, beginning sounds, and more. You can even group children in pairs for a ‘partner reading’ exercise, where one child reads a small text and the other closely copies the first. They can then switch roles, helping each other when they stumble.

Learn how to turn even the simplest of items into a learning resource for phonics and language development in next week’s Square Panda Thursday’s webinar. Join the live session on July 29, at 5 pm: https://squarepanda.app.link/e/2907b

Phonics teaches children to be fluent in a language while reading. To be more efficient, this instruction needs to work hand-in-hand with vocabulary instruction and other types of learning for a well-rounded development. From an educational perspective, being able to predict the pronunciation of words using letter-sound knowledge is better than rote learning the pronunciation of all words.

Touch. Sight. Sound. Hearing. Taste. 

A child’s experience in this world is one of multisensory stimulation. It is likely that evolution itself supports optimal functioning in such an environment. While all children reach their developmental goals at different paces, research suggests multisensory learning is one of the most effective strategies to enhance the learning experience.

*About ‘Multisensory’ And ‘Multisensory Learning’: The term ‘multisensory’ means using more than one sense at a time, while ‘multisensory learning’ incorporates learning techniques that use multiple senses at the same time. For example: Adding audio or visual aids into teaching and assignments. Not every lesson does (or needs to) include each sense, but such an approach does require more than one sense to be stimulated at a time for better learning outcomes.

Multisensory activities are based on the concept of ‘whole brain learning’, which is the belief that the best way to teach concepts is to involve all areas of the brain. In his book, the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (1987), American biologist Gerald Edelman wrote that more elaborate brain connections are formed with multisensory learning as compared to single sensory learning, greatly enhancing comprehension and retention. To learn more about connections in the brain and how they help with memory retention, consider reading how to help children retain learning.

Multisensory learning also proves effective to different types of learners: visual learners, auditory learners, tactile learners, and physical or kinesthetic learners. This ensures multisensory instruction reaches every learner in the classroom.

To help children enhance their multisensory awareness, we curated simple multisensory learning activities that tie into early childhood education and can be easily incorporated into the classroom or home:

Note: Each activity can be used (and tweaked) depending on children’s learning levels and interests.

Activity Name: Handprint Birds

You Will Need:

• Paint
• Glue
• White paper
• Coloured pencils and/or crayons
• Kid-safe scissors

Method: Paint children’s palms with one colour, and their fingers multiple colors like red, yellow, and green. Guide them to place their hands, palms down, on a sheet of white paper to create a handprint. On the thumb area, help them draw a beak using colored pencils or crayons. Draw an eye, a pair of feet, and you have a handprint bird! You can cut this out and make a sign or card, too.

Learning Outcomes: Fine motor skills, colour identification, creative exploration

Activity Name: Colored Corn Art

You Will Need:

• Glue stick
• 1 cup of regular corn kernels
• Vinegar
• Water
• Food coloring
• Containers for mixing food coloring (bowls, plastic cups, etc)
• A sheet of paper

Method: Fill half the container(s) with water and add an equal amount of vinegar to it. Ask children to choose food coloring(s) of their choice, and mix them into the container(s). Then add in a small amount (about half a cup) of corn kernels and leave them to soak overnight. The next day, ask the children to dry the corn kernels with paper towels. Ask each child to get a glue stick, a sheet of paper, and some of the colored corn. Encourage them to use some creativity to make fun designs with the different colors! (Note: it’s easier to add glue to the sheet and then stick the corn to it.)
Learning outcomes: Fine motor skills, socio-emotional development (patience), creativity

*Not recommended for younger children as there is a choking hazard.

Activity Name: Apple Basket Word Sort

You Will Need:

• Red or green paper
• Colored pencils or markers
• A basket
• Kid-safe scissors

Method: On apple-shaped cutouts (created by children from red and/or green paper), write CVC (i.e., consonant-vowel-consonant) words like MAP and HAT. Write as many words as the children can identify at their age. Mix up these ‘paper apples’ and place a basket in front of children. Call out the words at random and ask them to pick the right apple cutout and place it in the basket.

Modification: Repurpose this to enhance foundational numeracy skills; switch out the words for numbers.

Learning Outcomes: Vocabulary, colour identification, sorting, creativity, fine motor skills

*For online classes, you can ask parents to help you. 

Activity Name: Popsicle Scarecrow 

You Will Need:

• Glue
• Popsicle sticks
• Pens/pencils/crayons
• Buttons, beads, threads, ribbons (for extra ‘decoration’)

Method: Ask children for help in protecting the garden. They need to make a popsicle person to scare away pests like crows and mynahs. Glue the narrow sides of 4-5 popsicle sticks side-by-side, to make the body. Break one popsicle in half to make the arms, and glue them lengthwise. Use two popsicle sticks as the legs. Draw on some features, and even stick cotton or thread for the hair. Add to the multisensory approach by putting this scarecrow into a real garden, if you can access one. If not, you can even put it into a potted plant.
Learning Outcomes: Fine motor skills, creativity, environmental awareness

Activity Name: Road Trip

You Will Need:

• Toy vehicle (car, truck, etc) OR you can use any random object as a ‘vehicle’
• A plain sheet of paper
• Pen/pencil/crayons
• Tiny popsicle people
• Matchboxes
• Small cotton balls/balls of paper

Method: Take your little learners on an imaginary road trip. Draw a winding road on the paper. Decorate the sheet with matchboxes (for buildings and houses), add in some cotton/crushed paper as rocks and boulders. Drawn fields that are guarded by scarecrows or farms with scarecrow people in them. Place the vehicle at the start of the road; ask children to move it along the path. As they travel from place to place, ask them to create stories, identify the elements, and gradually make their own little roadmap.

Modification: Improve early literacy skills by writing names on buildings (school, hospital, etc.), and asking children to read, and later spell it themselves.

Learning Outcomes: Imagination, creativity, fine motor skills, storytelling, early literacy skills

Activity Name: Button Tree

You Will Need:

• Multicolored buttons (red, yellow, orange, brown, green)
• Colored pencils, crayons, and markers
• Glue stick

Method: Trace out a tree trunk and branches together with children. Give them glue sticks and ask them to glue buttons to the branches to make a colourful button tree.

*You can use cotton balls, rolled up bits of paper, actual dried leaves, or anything else to make this tree.

Modification: In later levels, you can ask children to group particular colours together, add fruits, little hand painted birds, and anything else they can think of.

Learning Outcomes: Fine motor skills, colour identification, sorting and grouping, environmental awareness, creativity, exploration and imagination, observation.

To drive their intrinsic motivation to keep coming back and learning, children need to engage with the learning process. This is where multisensory activities and instructions fit in; they present information through more than one sensory system at a time, encouraging optimal learning.

At Square Panda, we understand the value of multisensory learning. Our programs — for children and for educators — include content that uses all the learning pathways in the brain (auditory/visual, kinesthetic/tactile) to enhance multisensory exploration for robust educational outcomes in early childhood education. Learn more about our holistic NEP 2020-aligned programs: ecce.squarepanda.in

Share a video of your little learners working on the above activities, and we’ll make sure to mention you on our social media.

Think someone you know will benefit from this article? Forward it to them.

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.

India is a land of multiple religions, cultures, ethnic groups, and languages, which come together to give our nation its status as a diverse country. We also boast of the largest education system in the world, catering to more than 260 million children. Social mobility makes the crowd in the classroom more and more diverse by each year; with such a diverse population, a crucial need for inclusive learning arises, which can successfully cater to the diverse learning needs of each student.

The need for inclusive classrooms emerges right from early childhood, which is the critical period of brain development. 

The ASER 2019 report shows 90% of children in the age group of 4-8 years as enrolled in some type of educational institution. Of these, a large proportion of 5-year-olds was unable to perform expected tasks with ease, with children from less advantaged homes affected disproportionately. At this stage of development, early learning experts recommend students should be developing cognitive, social, and emotional skills as well as the conceptual foundations needed for formal schooling. While the recent policy released by the Department of Education (the NEP 2020) does mention a need to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030”, to create a force of literate future-ready youth, we need to translate the power of words into robust initiatives that can create a truly inclusive learning environment.

WHAT DOES INCLUSIVE EDUCATION LOOK LIKE?

The basic premise of inclusive education is that all children receive equal access to education rather than be segregated based on their individual, educational, social, emotional, financial, linguistic, or physical impairments.

Inclusive classrooms aim to bring all students together regardless of their strengths or weaknesses in any area and seek to maximize each child’s potential.

TODAY, WHAT ARE THE NEEDS AND CHALLENGES FOR ACHIEVING THE GOAL OF INCLUSIVE EDUCATION?

While the government of India has made strides in adopting inclusive policies to provide an equitable education for all, we still have a way to go before we can cater to multiculturalism and diverse learning needs successfully. The current education system in India faces some challenges for achieving inclusive education:

• A lack of trained educators.
• Large class sizes with multi-age classrooms.
• Linguistic diversity posing a challenge for educators.
• Marginalisation based on socio-economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds.

HOW QUALITY EDUCATION CAN BE EFFECTIVELY AND EFFICIENTLY DELIVERED FOR DIVERSE GROUPS OF CHILDREN? 

The need of the hour is to have equal access to high-quality education right from the foundational ages, across geographical and socio-economic boundaries. For this vision to materialise, the Indian education system needs to adopt certain practices:

Educator Training, Empowerment, & Education: An educational system is only as good as its educators. If learning has to be streamlined, yet personalised and adapted to individual learning needs, educators, anganwadi workers, and balwadi workers across India need to be empowered to recognise and instruct as per the diverse learning needs. The NEP 2020 recognises the importance of training educators, by adding this clause to its document: “The awareness and knowledge of how to teach children with specific disabilities including learning disabilities will be an integral part of all teacher education programmes, along with gender sensitization and sensitization towards all underrepresented groups in order to reverse their underrepresentation.”

Adoption Of Adaptive Software: From the ground up, educational institutions need to equip themselves with adaptive software and technology, to help teachers create a holistic blended classroom that allows them to personalise learning as per each student’s learning level.

Changing The Mindset: While educators work on imparting education from the early stages itself, a collaborative effort needs to be undertaken to involve parents in the teaching-learning process. All stakeholders in the learning process-the parents, the educators, the policymakers-need to work in tandem to see successful learning outcomes in inclusive classrooms.

Need For Flexible, Adaptive Curriculum And Learning Tools: Every child learns differently, and a one-size-fits-all approach is detrimental to the acquisition of learning. Something that the NEP 2020 mentions too, an adaptive blended curriculum that works with each learner’s learning level, can serve to assimilate students of all kinds and ages into inclusive classrooms.

“Education is the single greatest tool for achieving social justice and equality. Inclusive and equitable education – while indeed an essential goal in its own right – is also critical to achieving an inclusive and equitable society in which every citizen has the opportunity to dream, thrive, and contribute to the nation. The education system must aim to benefit India’s children so that no child loses any opportunity to learn and excel because of circumstances of birth or background. This Policy reaffirms that bridging the social category gaps in access, participation, and learning outcomes in school education will continue to be one of the major goals of all education sector development programmes.” – NEP 2020

Policies provide a good model to promote inclusive education. Presently, we need to transfer learnings from the policy to the education sphere. In a diverse nation like ours, a multicultural perspective in the education sector starting from the foundational stages is what will help us create a truly unified country that boasts equality across the Indian educational landscape.

The fundamental ability to read and perform basic numerical operations is an essential requirement that serves as the cornerstone of all future learnings. This acquisition occurs when the young learner is between 3-7 years old, a period critical to brain development. The skills developed in early childhood will create a base for enhancing greater cognitive development, socio-emotional skills, and reasoning.

Reading fluency allows students to comprehend text more easily and efficiently. Fluent readers exhibit several characteristics, including smoother voice inflections, faster word recognition, longer reading times with fewer pauses and increased eye contact with the text. Similarly, counting also helps children understand number sequences and groupings more efficiently because they learn how to identify patterns within a sequence or set by using their fingers or other physical objects as markers for each number in the sequence.

🖊️ Education in Early Years

In their early years, children are curious and energetic. They have an insatiable curiosity about the events around them. To develop their learning abilities and make sense of the world, teachers should provide them with opportunities to explore their environment and use their sensory capacities. These hands-on experiences help children better grasp basic concepts. In the process, they learn to make and test their own theories and explanations.

Children’s capacity for learning in the early years is enormous. Their brains are developing rapidly, so they can absorb a great deal of information and knowledge during this time. They also have remarkable powers of observation and memory that enable them to memorize information easily.

For example, when a child pushes a heavy cart across a room, they learn that pushing makes it go in one direction; pulling makes it go in another direction, and stopping makes it stop moving altogether. Through these experiences, children begin to develop their thinking skills as they develop their language skills through listening and talking with others and reading books together as a class or individually at home with parents. In addition, building blocks and puzzles allow children to discover fundamental physics principles, such as gravity or balance.

For foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) the role of educators and parents is essential for providing adequate supervision and guiding children toward appropriate choices during playtime activities. Adults should encourage children’s curiosity by asking open-ended questions. Allowing your children time to explore their environment at their own pace, rather than rushing them through meal or nap times, will help them feel comfortable trying new things.

🖊️ State of FLN in India

Around 260 million children are studying in more than 1.5 million schools across India at present. From these, over 70% of children in Class 3 do not have basic reading and arithmetic skills. Data shows that each year, an estimated 6 million children complete 8 years of compulsory schooling in India with alarmingly low learning levels. Such worrying trends in the formative years of schooling, when the cognitive skill development is the highest, can greatly destabilize a nation.

However, the latest FLN report released in December 2021 highlights the role of NEP 2020 early intervention projects such as NIPUN Bharat, leading to long-term improved learning outcomes. The State of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy in India Index was established to measure the effect of early learning programs. It measures the results on five pillars, each with 41 indicators. The 5 pillars are Access to Education, Learning Outcomes, Basic Health Governance and Educational Infrastructure.

According to the scorecards, Kerala (67.95) and West Bengal (58.95) are the top-scoring regions in Small and Large states, respectively. These were followed by Lakshadweep (52.69) and Mizoram (51.64). On the other hand, the index showed only 4 UTs and 17 states scored above the national average(48.38). States that performed poorly on the index include Odisha (45.58), followed by Jharkhand (45.28), Madhya Pradesh (38.69), Uttar Pradesh (38.46) and Bihar (36.81).

Without the basic skills of foundational literacy and numeracy, the benefits of all future learning and future success become void. To truly become a self-reliant nation, India needs to turn the spotlight towards strengthening the existing ECCE programs to highlight foundational learning from the teacher training as well as the curriculum perspective.

🖊️ The Way Forward

Investing in quality ECCE to boost foundational learning improves the attainment of the above gateway skills, which pave the way for more robust future learning prospects and employability. Providing foundational skill development across the grassroots levels is an effective equalizer, allowing for inclusivity in early education and leading to better economic gains for the country as a whole aside from improving the learning outcomes of individual children. During the release of NEP 2020, the government also emphasized empowering our nation by increasing initiatives toward early childhood education.

Square Panda is transforming the landscape of early education, helping students to learn new concepts at a deeper level using engaging storytelling, games and play. Our foundational learning programs equip teachers with resources that make learning fun and engaging. To know more about how we are contributing to foundational literacy and numeracy in India, visit ecce.squarepanda.in/.