"How to nurture the deepest levels of learning and understanding" by Dr Kathryn Peckham

The processes of learning are complex, interwoven and continual, and begin before a child is even born. As every child revisits ideas and skills, they will adapt and perfect their understanding as their minds and bodies grow, establishing dispositions for, and attitudes towards, all their future learning. Fuelled through every experience and supported through every sense, this is far more complex and important than simply bestowing information.

Learning of any meaningful kind is about more than discrete facts that simply need to be learnt, it is about ideas and concepts that need to be understood, ready to be used and adapted in other situations. And, if you want a child to have the ability to think for themselves and the motivations and inclinations to do so, it is also about a frame of mind.

Unlike surface knowledge, any meaningful understanding of something requires opportunities to structure patterns within it, appreciate its underlying concepts and how it relates to other experiences. Take for example, an understanding of how weight works; how something can be heavier or lighter than something else and the meaning this might give us about what is inside.

When a child plays in the water, they are experiencing how a jug of water weighs less as it empties, something they feel throughout their whole body. When they then apply this developing idea to a bucket of sand or a bag of feathers, they are learning to apply new concepts to existing situations. And when they then explore these ideas even further, transporting and pouring from different vessels perhaps, they are making connections in their learning, playing with new ideas as they develop a deeper awareness. These skills that support visualisation and reflection will, in time, allow them to know things without needing to experience it, techniques they will be relying on in the school classroom.

The most important thing you can do to encourage and promote highly successful educational outcomes is to help children see the wonder of learning, its opportunities to discover and learn things about the world and themselves. Offer children first-hand, spontaneous experiences throughout the day, from the first “hello” in the morning to writing their masterpiece in the afternoon. Consider how you can maximise the potential of every experience, no matter how mundane it may seem to you, or how often it has been repeated. Think about how it can be experienced through all their senses, even something as familiar as a well-loved story can come to life when you think of the sensory learning you can add to it.

Children have no hesitancy in freely initiating or valuing the learning potential of play. But while it is infinitely rewarding, it can also be easily distracted from by screens or by being overly-directed. When you offer children open-ended, natural resources within spaces where they feel a sense of ownership, their natural explorations will see them encouraged into new areas of knowledge and challenge. They will be quick to utilise objects freely within their play, provided they are unconstrained by predetermined objectives or expected actions.

When playing with real objects and materials, children make links and connections in their thinking with what is familiar, encouraging a greater level of purposeful vocabulary. Exploring cause and effect with water, sand or mud play allows them to establish relationships between actions and consequences.

When they can experiment and try and take risks where there is no wrong answer, they are establishing their resilience, persistence and curiosity within safe boundaries. Opportunities to reflect on their ideas, to think, consider, ponder and come back to as they need, allows them to experiment with ideas before committing them as fact, all the while allowing misconceptions to become evident while you tactfully guide.

And remember, children are not driven by long term goals. With a limit to how much information they can keep in their mind, they need freedom to respond to whatever is driving them in the moment, and the time to allow their ideas to germinate. Interruptions can derail these powerful learning experiences, so keep time restrictions to a minimum as you take care not to invade their experiences.

Children also need to experience their own success, to build secure confidence in their abilities as they develop the strength to meet and succeed in future challenges. You can promote this learning by offering appropriate challenges and risk with engaging resources and sufficient time for them to get stuck in. If difficulties arise, let them see how they can resolve things themselves as they make choices and experience how perseverance and thinking is rewarded. Allow them the time and space for free movement and quiet reflection as they revisit concepts and embed their developing expertise. Be on hand to promote their inquiries but avoid being too quick to intervene and consider limiting activities that tend to demand their attention as you let them experience their natural learning instincts.

When given opportunities to use and combine their newly acquired skills and abilities, children learn how to continuously perfect them, to arrive at answers that are meaningful to them and to understand what new abilities they need to explore next. But so much more than this, they are learning about their own abilities as a learner, something that they will take with them into every new experience going forward. So, enjoy experiential learning with your children and harness this powerful learning medium and the deeper understanding offered through it, before the demands of more formal classrooms replace early years environments more naturally drenched in play.

I hope you enjoyed this first article from The Learning Child, in the coming months we will look specifically at nurturing all these wonderful practices with babies, toddlers and young children. And in the meantime, bring focus back to nurturing all of children’s growth and development with a Nurturing Childhoods Accreditation.

Whether you are looking for a setting-wide approach to reflective practice and active CPD or a more personalised approach with the Nurturing Childhoods Practitioner Accreditation, gain recognition for the nurturing practice you deliver. Through 12 online sessions throughout the year, join me and hundreds of nurturing practitioners as together we really begin developing the potential of all children in their early years.