Scattergories

Space and time are at the heart of children's daily activities: drawing, writing, moving a piece on a game board, putting together a puzzle or building a building, as well as identifying landmarks to get from one point to another. All of these call for spatial organization and orientation. Furthermore, telling a story, correctly ordering a sequence of events, learning the time, and carrying out an activity in a set amount of time all call for temporal organization and orientation. All of these concepts are gradually developed through various motor and cognitive skills. This is easily observed in the development of children's language when they use the words inside, outside, next to, behind, before, after, yesterday and tomorrow. In short, skills related to spatial and temporal organization impact several areas of children's development.

From the first babbling of a baby to the oral presentations of primary school children in front of the class, the concept of language undergoes a lot of development! From their first months, children need to communicate. To do this, they listen attentively to sounds and try to respond in their own way. Little by little, they understand that things and people are associated with sounds, and they try to reproduce them to make themselves understood. They make progress simultaneously in comprehension and expression, and they acquire vocabulary thanks to daily exchanges with their parents and educators. Children also exercise their ability to communicate and express their emotions during role-playing games and by adapting their speech to the situation they create. Spoken language can also be stimulated by all sorts of interventions: looking at books, learning nursery rhymes and songs, telling stories, discussing past events, making connections, and asking questions. Playing with words and finding rhymes and words that start with the same sound are all exercises in phonological awareness that help to perceive and identify the different components of words. Several studies prove that a child's language background impacts their success when learning to read and write.

Learning to identify written words and understanding their meaning is a major challenge for a 6-year-old child. Reading is a process that begins in first grade and is perfected throughout primary school. More than a visual decoding exercise involving knowledge of the alphabet and the ability to recognize words in general, reading requires that the child develop strategies to understand the meaning of the text. In addition, understanding texts is very important in learning all other school subjects. Producing a text calls upon several skills that must all be used simultaneously but which are gradually acquired during primary school through lessons in writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation.

Creativity is the ability to imagine, build and implement something new or to discover an original solution to a problem. It is, therefore, not limited to the arts alone and develops gradually from the age of 18 months. Given its importance in a child’s development, we should seize every opportunity to stimulate it daily. Indeed, a child who has learned to be creative will have good problem-solving and conflict-solving skills, expressing themselves, exploring and finding new ideas. All types of games and activities contribute to nurturing creativity. It is important to provide the child with a variety of materials that the child can explore and use as he or she pleases. In children’s games, an ordinary piece of fabric suddenly becomes a cape, a picnic mat, a blanket for dolls, and so much more! Books, nursery rhymes, dressing-up and improvisation games, for example, fuel the imagination in wonderful ways and inspire fun in the young and old alike.