Johannesburg - Parents don’t need to worry about their children learning to read and write before they are in Grade 1.
Instead, they have to concentrate on ensuring the children are healthy.
Education expert Professor Elizabeth Henning of the University of Johannesburg (UJ) said there was too much pressure on parents to ensure their children are school ready.
This, she said, was unnecessary.
“Poor parents, they try everything to prepare the ideal Grade 1 child. My ideal Grade 1 child is somebody who knows the sounds of the language that the teacher is going to use. The child must have good hearing, see properly – especially small things like letters and symbols. The child must be quite healthy and well fed. Children who don’t have enough food suffer,” she said.
Henning said reading was a fairly new phenomenon for our brains. “There is a lot of wonderful research in the last 20 and 30 years, our brains are not made to read. It’s not part of our heritage, not part of our DNA. What is in our DNA is to see the little patterns in the natural world.
“When you take kids when they are very young and you train them to read words, you are actually wasting some of their time. When they do these things when they are seven, you do it much faster, which is easier. They can focus, their bodies are right for it. Little children want to be all over the show. They shouldn’t learn to read so early.”
Henning, who works with the Funda UJabule Primary School, based at UJ in Soweto, said younger children learn better in play. “Play isn’t a fun thing. It’s a thing that helps us to know the world and other people. In play, young children see patters, work out problems, make decisions and work on their memory,” she explained.
Henning said the pressure of producing a Grade 1-ready child, was sometimes too much for parents. “Parents need TLC, they need understanding. They are so scared that their children will not achieve. There are things in education that are too tough for parents. Even in schools where everybody speaks the same language there are a lot of problems with parents understanding the curriculum,” she added.
The Star