Ted Neill
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| 5-year-old Yali lives in the Guangxi Province of China. Her family cannot afford her tuition fee for kindergarten study. World Vision's Early Childhood Education Project brought her back to the kindergarten. |
By Ted Neill, Early Childhood Care and Development Specialist, World Vision
It was at an early childhood development (ECD) conference that I first heard a speaker describe ECD programmes as the “education vaccine”. He could not actually recall where he had first heard the phrase himself, but it had stuck with him. It stuck with me too. In the years since, I have found myself sharing the same notion with colleagues at education conferences and ECD symposiums the world over. Inevitably its well received and spread from one colleague to another with the speed of a viral video. Something about the notion resonates with those of us in the early education field.
International Literacy Day provides us an opportunity to reflect on the importance of reaching children when they are young
International Literacy Day provides us an opportunity to reflect on the importance of reaching children when they are young (0-8), and even before they are born, with the proper stimulation, nutrition and care to help make them effective readers throughout their school years and life. We know that:
- Young children reared in families where parents provide rich language and literacy support do better in school than those who do not.;[1]
- Exposure to less common, more sophisticated vocabulary (rare words) at home relates directly to children's vocabulary acquisition;[2] and
- Children who acquire strong vocabularies during the preschool years demonstrate improved academic achievement through tertiary levels of education over children who are not exposed to language rich environments.[3]
As a result, World Vision has been building early childhood programmes targeted at pregnant women, parents of young children and young children ages 0-8 in all the countries where we work. I have personally visited World Vision ECD programmes in over a dozen countries.
So the next time you see a parent repeating a baby’s babbling or hear children repeating a nursery rhyme, be encouraged, these are the readers and writers for tomorrow.
I’ve seen health and education programmes for children 0-8 years of age integrated seamlessly in Indonesia; and huge gains in early education quality in Myanmar and Timor Leste. Our Afghanistan office has made education accessible to girls where, in living memory, it was punishable by death. And our country offices throughout the African regions continue to partner with governments to establish national standards around ECD, improve quality of teaching, as well as parent-child interactions.
Working on early literacy, or pre-literacy, with the youngest of children does not necessarily look like it does in primary school. With the youngest children, we encourage parents to sing, copy sounds (even nonsensical ones) and talk to their babies. We try to educate parents of preschoolers that between the ages of 3-6 being able to write is not nearly as important as recognising letters, connecting them to sounds and learning to listen to and tell stories. These simple activities – sometimes dismissed as child’s play – are quite serious indeed, for they form the foundation for reading and writing, which in turn helps children become lifetime learners.
So the next time you see a parent repeating a baby’s babbling or hear children repeating a nursery rhyme, be encouraged, these are the readers and writers for tomorrow.
[1] Sum, Andrew et al., (2009)
[2] Thirty Million Word Initiative: http://tmw.org/
[3] http://www.naeyc.org/
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