Parents Impact on their PreSchoolers' Developing Minds

As part of our Grow up Great series,Steve Adubato talks with Cindy Terebush, author of “Teach the Whole Preschooler: Strategies for Nurturing Developing Minds” about the profound impact parents have on their children.

7/8/17 #3013

Excerpt:

"Hi, I'm Steve Adubato. We're talking early childhood education with people who know and we are pleased to welcome Cindy Terebush, early childhood education expert, parenting consultant, author of Teach the Whole Preschooler: Strategies For Nurturing Developing Minds. Good to see you Cindy. Thank you. You were a part of a panel discussion we had on the word gap, right? Yes. Dealing with vocabulary issues. But we're having a larger discussion on early childhood. By the way, define early childhood. Early childhood is defined as birth to age eight. Eight? Eight. Until about age eight or nine, they take in information and learn the same way. That's why it's such a shame that children who are in kindergarten, 1st, 2nd grade are at desks as long as they are. That's not how they learn best. Hold on. Wait a minute. What's the problem with sitting at a desk? They just don't learn best that way. I think it's true of all of us that we learn by being active in our experience but especially for young children. They add to their knowledge naturally when they're active and they're explorers and they're discoverers and it's how they develop critical thinking skills and we need to let them do that. And when you sit them down in front of a piece of paper, they do not get the same depth of learning that you do when exploring and experimenting. Play this out a little bit. The basics. Mm hmm. Reading, writing, arithmetic. Has that changed at all? The way we approach it do you mean? A: The way we approach it? B: are they not at the core of the foundation of learning for children? No, I think there is a lot of pressure placed on that. Especially in the early childhood. The earlier early childhood years there's a lot of pressure on those people who are teaching two, three, four, five year olds to get these children reading sooner and doing math sooner. But so much of it is developmental. They can't do it until they can do it. And in order for them to be ready to do it, there are other skills that we need to strengthen. Such as? We need to strengthen the gross motor and fine motor skills. We need to... Jump past that. That's jargony to me. We need to strengthen the movement in the fingers and their bodies. Their body movement helps brain development. We need to be teaching them about personal interaction, like you and I are having. Not so much in front of screens so that they get nonverbal communication. How do you teach that interpersonal skillset? The ability to be in a conversation? To talk? To listen..."