How parents can help kids develop school-readiness skills through play
“A lot of these foundational skills you can reinforce at home by playing with your children - the power rests in our hands."
Picture: Pixabay
Gugs Mhlungu spoke to resident Parenting and Human Potential Expert, Nikki Bush.
Listen to their conversation in the audio clip below.
It's no secret that a large number of South Africa's primary school children are in crisis when it comes to literacy and numeracy.
The crisis is said to stem from children not having the right foundation.
"There is a lack of foundational skills. So often we talk about the poor matric pass rate and the high dropout rate in grade 10 but the focus is in the wrong place - we should be looking at foundational skills that are acquired and embedded in children long before they go to formal school."
- Nikki Bush, Parenting and Human Potential Expert
"Parents should be looking for play-based pre-schools, but very sadly, the government does not fund pre-school education so the bulk of the children going into primary school in our country do not have the gift of a pre-school education in which these foundational perceptual skills are embedded through play. We've also been sold another misnomer and that is that the government will provide an education from the age of 7."
- Nikki Bush, Parenting and Human Potential Expert
"I really want to say to parents who have got children in that foundation phase from birth through to the age of 6/7, you are your child's primary teacher, don't wait for learning to happen in the four walls of a classroom or within the pages of a book or on a computer screen. A lot of these foundational skills you can reinforce at home by playing with your children - the power rests in our hands. Don't wait, don't give away the gift of learning to somebody else when you can start at home."
- Nikki Bush, Parenting and Human Potential Expert
Bush emphasises that play is essential for reading, writing and maths.
So, if you are a parent of a child who will be entering grade R or grade 1 next year, you can help your kids be school-ready by simply just playing with them.
Here are some simple examples of how in your everyday interactions you can teach your children:
"Maybe you've gone to the supermarket and bought a bag of apples, allow your pre-schooler to unpack the apples and put them in the fruit bowl, and they get to count how many apples are in the packet that they are putting into the fruit bowl - so now we've done a numeracy exercise. You could get them to lay all of those apples out in a line and maybe there are nine apples and now you could tell them to take two apples away and then recount what is left - you've just done subtraction..."
- Nikki Bush, Parenting and Human Potential Expert
"When you're dressing your child or teaching your child how to dress themselves, they learn about their body parts...let's put your left foot in the left shoe and your right foot in the right shoe. Let's pull your t-shirt over your head…so the mathematical words about position - left, right, above, below, in front of, behind, full and empty- these are all things children can learn from their parents at home."
- Nikki Bush, Parenting and Human Potential Expert
For more on the topic of how parents can help kids develop school-readiness skills through play, click here.
Scroll up to listen to the full interview.