Tuesday, 26 October 2010

Children are cleverer than adults used to think 2

After writing yesterday’s post on what researchers have observed about babies ability to do maths, I was reminded of the behaviour of my oldest daughter when she was a baby. When she was 5 weeks old, her mother went into hospital to have her tonsils removed, so the poor child was left in my tender care. To make life as easy as possible for myself, I quickly developed a routine. I brought her home from the child minder’s, and fed her her tea. He clothes then went straight into the washing machine, and she went straight to the bath. I washed her while singing the bathing song. This determined what part of her body I washed… something along the lines of “now we go and wash the feet, and now we go and wash the knees” set to the old Irish folk tune “Let no one steal away your thyme”. I remember that it finished with the line “It’s time to ring the baby out” when I would lift her out of the water and swing her from side to side while saying “Ding, dong, ding, dong, ding dong”. But I digress from the purpose of my script today. The point of this story comes with the drying song. I would lay her on the bed and dry her systematically, while singing the drying song. This process required me to lift her right arm and dry her armpit, then to lift her left arm to dry her left armpit. On the third day of doing this no sooner had I dried her right armpit than she raised her left arm herself. At the age of 5 weeks my daughter knew what was happening to her, and able to anticipate what was going to happen next. To what extent the use of her song important in this? Would she have recognised the routine without it? There is work for the child psychologists to do there, but I believe that it played a crucial part. I think that babies and children respond to the use of music and song, that it gives them patterns to recognise, it helps them learn. Surely this is obvious, don’t we all remember poetry that scans better than prose that is just a connection of words? This is why at Puppet Maths we have adopted the use of the Sands Daniels musical times tables. The times tables comprise 80 facts that children have to learn (or 40 facts if you consider that half of them are the same as the other half - 2x6 being the same as 6 x 2). These are boring to learn by rote. But if they’re set to music, if they scan, then they are memorable and children can pick them up without difficulty. At Puppet Maths our aim is to help children use their natural ability to learn easily.

No comments:

Post a Comment