Preschool Brain Development – The Best Ways to Start School
Preschool brain development of your child is an incredibly important time in your child’s overall development. This is a time when you can set in stone good behaviors and preferences toward learning, curiosity, and socializing. The brain develops by cells communicating with each other and making connections. The more that the child experiences, the more they will communicate and the more the cells will connect.
When a child reaches the age of three, they have twice the number of connections within the brain as the average adult does. The way in which the brain learns something during the preschool years is different from how an adult brain would learn.
Factors Affecting Preschool Brain Development
- The amount of time a parent spends with the child.
- How much the child reads.
- How they are spoken to.
Time Well Spent
Spending time with your child will help them to grow socially and they will feel a lot more content and happy to learn. If you read to them with picture books, that helps their brain to associate words with pictures and therefore it speeds up the learning process.
For children, images speak louder than words and the brain remembers pictures more than it will remember a word in a book. Make sure to spend ample quality time with your child and try to read or play with numbers as much as possible.
Routines
Routines are picked up easily by the preschool brain, so breakfast time or story time for example are well remembered. You should notice that if you give your child breakfast at the same time every morning, their brain will soon start to remember and the child will come to expect their breakfast at the same time every day.
Similarly, if you read to your child at three o clock every afternoon, they will soon remember that and they may even remind you to read to them once it gets to three o clock/ Try to use this to your advantage by starting a habit of reading time that you can later change to ‘homework’ time.
This will make doing homework more natural and accepted later in life, rather than it seeming to be a chore. The same goes for bedtime.
Speaking Properly
Now when you think of how people usually speak to children, the voice is usually higher pitched and the words are said a little more excitedly than you would talk to an adult. This actually really helps the development of the preschool child’s brain as it captures their attention.
If you talk to your child in a flat, ordinary tone then they soon get bored and the brain does not focus as much on what you are saying as it would with an excitable voice.
This helps in almost every situation, when reading to them and/or using pictures or numbers, using an animated voice and body language helps deliver the information in a manner that makes the most impact.
The brain is not fully working properly when you are born and it only truly develops as the child grows and interacts with new things. Remember to nourish your child’s preschool brain development with plenty of quality time spent playing, reading, and talking. To develop good habits for lifelong learning make sure to set a routine that includes reading time. Take advantage of this time in your child’s life to prepare him or her for all challenges that lay ahead.
