Forming neural links for language is relatively easy up to about age six, and though achievable after that time, requires much more effort. That is why effective initial teaching is so important…

The brain imaging studies have also shown how difficult and exhausting is the task of reading for struggling students. They use up to five times as much energy when reading as do fluent readers. It is not surprising that they prefer not to read…

The recent literacy inquiry report commissioned by former education minister Brendan Nelson called for the reintroduction of phonics, in which children learn to read by breaking words into sounds and syllables.

Source: The Age
http://tinyurl.com/2jf3hd

Experience, as the old saying goes, is the best teacher. And experience seems to play an important early role in how infants learn to understand and produce language.

Using new technology that measures the magnetic field generated by the activation of neurons in the brain, researchers tracked what appears to be a link between the listening and speaking areas of the brain in newborn, 6-month-old and one-year-old infants, before infants can speak.

The study, which appears in this month’s issue of the journal NeuroReport, shows that Broca’s area, located in the front of the left hemisphere of the brain, is gradually activated during an infant’s initial year of life, according to Toshiaki Imada, lead author of the paper and a research professor at the University of Washington’s Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences.

Broca’s area has long been identified as the seat of speech production and, more recently, as that of social cognition and is critical to language and reading, according to Patricia Kuhl, co-author of the study and co-director of the UW’s Institute for Brain and Learning Sciences…

Kuhl said there is a long history of a link in the adult brain between the areas responsible for understanding and those responsible for speaking language. The link allows children to mimic the speech patterns they hear when they are very young. That’s why people from Brooklyn speak “Brooklynese,” she said.

“We think the connection between perception and production of speech gets formed by experience, and we are trying to determine when and how babies do it,” said Kuhl, who also is a professor of speech and hearing sciences…

“We think that early in development babies need to play with sounds, just as they play with their hands. And that helps them map relationships between sounds with the movements of their mouth and tongue,” she said. “To master a skill, babies have to play and practice just as they later will in learning how to throw a baseball or ride a bike. Babies form brain connections by listening to themselves and linking what they hear to what they did to cause the sounds. Eventually they will use this skill to mimic speakers in their environments.”

This playing with language starts, Kuhl said, when babies begin cooing around 12 weeks of age and begin babbling around seven months of age.

“They are cooing and babbling before they know how to link their mouth and tongue movements. This brain connection between perception and production requires experience,” she said…

Source: PHYSORG.COM
http://www.physorg.com/news71809173.html

Leaders in government, business and philanthropy today will announce a new partnership aimed at preparing the state’s youngest children for success in school.

Gov. Christine Gregoire and William H. Gates Sr., of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will lead the public-private partnership, called Thrive by Five: The Washington Early Learning Fund. The group will start with $9 million, with more funds added in the years to come…

The business community is supporting the early-learning effort, Watt said, because it’s seen as a sound investment in the future workforce. The economy needs creativity, imagination and discipline from its workers, he said, and some of those skills are learned in those early years.

According to a study by Harvard University professor Jack Shonkoff, chairman of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, much of a child’s development takes place between birth and age 5. What they learn in that window can determine how they fare both in school and in life, says the study, which was prepared for Thrive by Five.

Children who come to kindergarten healthy, and with strong social and cognitive skills, are more likely to finish school, and less likely to be unemployed or commit crime, according to the 2004 Perry Preschool study, which spanned 40 years.

“The fact is that kids who start behind tend to stay behind,” said Greg Shaw, director of early learning for the Gates Foundation…

Source: The Seattle Times
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003116726_earlylearning10m.html

So, a 7-year-old tells his parents, in the most belligerent tone imaginable, that he is not going to clean up his room. Later that day, he discovers that he cannot go outside to play with his friends or watch his favorite program. Furthermore, his parents send him to bed one hour early.

Those are good consequences, because in the Real World, when someone defies a legitimate authority figure — an employer, for example — things will happen that will ultimately result in a restriction of privilege.

Source: The Miami Herald
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/people/family/parenting/14984829.htm

Philip Nel, a children’s literature professor at Kansas State University, said boys feel more pressure to read what he calls “gender appropriate” books. “Girls have a much greater ability to identify with a narrator or character who is not the same sex,” said Nel, who teaches a course on the “Harry Potter” series. He points out that author Joanne Rowling used the name J.K. Rowling to make the series more appealing to boys, who might not immediately identify the writer as female.

Source: The Plain Dealer
http://tinyurl.com/3dso2v

This is just one example of ways that communities across the country are trying to combat a phenomenon called “summer learning loss.” This loss of learning over the summer can mean an academic setback for some children that will take weeks, and in some cases months, to remedy in the fall.

“One hundred years of research confirms that all young people are at risk of losing ground academically over the summer months,” says Ron Fairchild, Executive Director of the Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.

According to Dr. Harris Cooper, Professor of Psychology at Duke University and the director of the program in education, test scores were, on average, at least one month lower when students returned to school in the fall than when they left in the spring…

“The areas that kids most forget are the things that they learn through repetition and practice, such as spelling words and math computation,” says Cooper.

Research points to the fact that all young people are at risk of losing more than two months in math computation skills, regardless of where they are in the socioeconomic spectrum…

“By the time that kids reach fifth grade,” says Fairchild, “on average, low income kids are close to two years behind their higher income peers in reading performance as a result of their experiencing summer learning loss.”

And with teachers spending between two and six weeks at the beginning of each school year re-teaching material that students have forgotten over the summer, the ramifications of summer learning loss might affect all students.

Why the learning loss?

One of the reasons for the losses in reading and math skills over the summer may have to do with how embedded the practice of these skills are in the child’s environment.

“Parents who know the importance of reading will make sure that their kids read over the summer — and it is not unusual for kids to find things to read,” says Cooper. “Math is less naturally embedded in children’s environment, so they are more likely to forget math skills over the summer.” …

“If professional athletes or musicians took a three-month break from any type of training or practice, you would expect them to come back to their sport or to their orchestra experiencing a lag in their performance, and it would take a while to get back into performance shape.”

And while many parents lament the loss of the lazy days of summer, experts emphasize that learning doesn’t stop just because the school year ends.

“Forgetting things is something that all humans do,” Cooper says. “Kids have active minds and they are learning all the time. So it doesn’t make much sense to ignore what they are being exposed to for three months of the year.” …

Source: CNN.com
http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/06/29/summer.learning.loss/