Today’s youth were born into a high technology world; they have
always been around electronic screens and had instant access to
information. It is not surprising, then, that many children have been
exposed to sophisticated graphics and animations at a very young age,
but a recent report on the Science Daily website
explains that a new study shows, “…early writing, preceding any formal
education, plays an instrumental role in improving a child’s literacy
level, vocabulary, and fine motor skills.” These findings suggest that
parents probably should shift from teaching letters of the alphabet to
also helping their children to connect the sounds to the letters on
paper.
The study was conducted by Professor Dorit Aram of the Jaime and Joan
Constantiner School of Education of Tel Aviv University and with
Professor Samantha W. Bindman of the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and other US colleagues. Professor Aram studied adult
support of young children’s writing. One type of support,
“grapho-phonemic mediation,” involves the adult being “actively involved
in helping a child break down a word into segments to connect sounds to
corresponding letters.” Professor Aram studied the levels of parental
support for 135 ethnically-diverse, middle-income preschool children
during a writing activity at a semi-structured birthday party.
Researchers found that parental support was most useful in developing
early literacy skills in young children. “The thing is to encourage
children to write, but to remember that in writing, there is a right and
a wrong,” said Prof. Aram. “We have found that scaffolding is a
particularly beneficial activity, because the parent guides the child.
And, if that parent guides the child and also demands precision in a
sensitive and thoughtful way — i.e. ‘what did you mean to write here?
Let me help you’ — this definitely develops the child’s literary skill
set.”
