Playing by the sea to see who can find the most shells and colored pebbles, counting the number plates of cars that start with a specific letter, drawing little frames on the sheet of paper or writing words on the sand, keeping a diary and filling it with photos, receipts, notes and many memories of the beautiful days of vacation. These are some activities that parents and children can do together on holiday, under an umbrella or in the mountains. Fun pastimes, with a ‘secret’ quality: they can help little ones who are leaving kindergarten, in view of their debut in the ‘grown-up school’. Word of speech therapists. Experts suggest some ideas for having fun, also combining business with pleasure.
Reading and writing
Arriving with adequate prerequisites to develop literacy, numeracy and numeracy skills “can make a difference in learning the basics and future concepts”. Not only that: playful activities such as those indicated by experts can signal children who show fragility in language, in recognizing sounds or in making a graphic gesture, and on which to start early interventions that stimulate skills not yet achieved at this age.
According to the latest data for 2022, provided by the Office of statistics-surveys on schools, around 1,400 out of just under 1.4 million pre-school boys and girls (0.1%) have difficulty consolidating these pre-requisites , necessary for the quickest and best learning, due to possible neurodevelopment disorders, immaturity or for reasons of a transient nature. The Federation of Italian speech therapists (Fli) wants to “raise awareness of the importance of developing these skills in the preschool golden age, inviting this summer to share lots of family games under the umbrella”.
“Since 2010, and subsequently in the MIUR decrees of 2013, the importance of activating targeted and early assessment procedures to intercept these children” with difficulty was underlined, he explains Tiziana Rossetto, president of Fli. “And yet, the White Paper on the management of DSA (Specific Learning Disorders), released in 2022, still signals an enormous lack of homogeneity among the Regions in launching prevention protocols, often due to the different sensitivity of school principals and teachers in proposing initiatives ‘formative’ to the best learning”.
Preparation before school
“Studies related to the psychology of language and learning – adds Rossetto – instead agree on the importance of preparing boys and girls for the acquisition of reading and writing and numerical and calculation skills and on the need to fill their ‘backpack ‘ with skills and awareness that favor the transition of children from kindergarten to primary school. Recent studies and the latest guidelines on Dsa, drawn up by the Higher Institute of Health in 2022, show that the acquisition of learning from the first instrumentality related to these skills, is based on skills and competences acquired during the pre-school period.Therefore, in kindergarten, during the last year it is essential to activate a systematic observation of the children: thanks to screening projects, it is possible to identify the boys and girls with the most difficulty and support them”.
“In order for these skills to develop smoothly – intervenes Ilaria Ceccarelli, professor of speech therapy at the La Sapienza University of Rome – a child who approaches reading, writing and numerical and calculation skills must possess advanced phonetic-phonological competence , that is, being able to correctly articulate the sounds of language, having a good vocabulary, knowing how to tell and converse correctly”.
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The game
Around the age of 5 and a half, Ceccarelli continues, “the child must then also develop the ability to ‘play’ with the sounds of language: knowing how to recognize if two words are the same or different, if they start with the same sound, how many syllables there are composed.
This reflective skill promotes the development of reading and writing skills. Furthermore, the child must know how to control the graphic stroke, holding the pencil correctly, reproducing graphic elements, copying simple drawings. Last but not least, he should know how to write his name and recognize its letters, know numbers at least within the tens and make judgments of magnitude with small quantities “.
The role of parents
Parents, he suggests Anna Giulia De CagnoFli vice-president speech therapist, “they can use the various moments of interaction with their son or daughter, on vacation, by carrying out simple, fun but important activities from a functional point of view, such as focusing the child’s attention on the length of the words, on the number of their syllables, on their resemblance (like dog and carrot), or playing in the car with colors and license plates, counting how many are white and how many blue, or even getting familiar with numbers through recipes. , they prepare, playing, for primary school activities”.
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