Welcome to the Helen Doron Early Childhood Education Podcast. This is our second podcast. Here is your host, Helen Doron, Founder and CEO of the Helen Doron Education Group, which included Helen Doron Early English, Math Writers, Ready Steady Move, and soon to come an Early Childhood Education Program.
Helen:
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, or wherever this podcast may find you. What I would like to talk about today is some of the things I discovered while researching for our course Baby’s Best Start. This is for children from three months onwards.
The reason for this course is that with language, the earlier the better. You can’t start a language early enough. Indeed, we know that even within the mother’s womb the child is learning language. He is learning the intonation and there is research today to indicates that he’s even learning vocabulary; when the mother says “right,” and moves to the right, the child understands what “right” means. When the mother says “left,” and moves to the left, the child is understanding this. There is some preliminary research that even in the womb the child is picking up even vocabulary; however, after birth for sure.
We know that children learn language, learn it superbly, and learn it very quickly. I’d like to talk about some of the important points I discovered while researching for Baby’s Best Start. Of course, I was initially aware that the brain grows until the age of six; in fact, most of brain growth is done until the age of three-years old. It is in this time that the children do their primary language learning, up to the age of three-years old.
Children learn about 1,000 words a year. The average child’s going to learn 1,000 by the age of one, and then by the age of six, a child will know about 6,000 words. That’s the average child, of course. This can be increased and it can be decreased. Speak to your child less, give the child less input and your child will know less. Speak to your child more, give the child more input, give the child more sophisticated input, read from books, read higher vocabulary with more pictures; yes the child will learn more. Of course, the child could know 12,000 words by the age of six; I’m just talking about an average. The child learns an average of about 1,000 words a year.
Now, when creating Baby’s Best Start, there were many components that were necessary. The first component is that of songs. Songs are very important. I’m going to quote from a lady called Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, who has a PhD. She is a psychoanalyst at the University of California Berkeley. She said,
“Scientists are confirming what teachers have long suspected. Music not only touches peoples’ souls, it also shapes growing minds. When children sing or play music, they become better readers, thinkers, and learners. The more we discover about how the brain works, the more we recognize how crucial music is to children’s learning.”
That is why we filled our sets with music, rhyme, and rhythm. You don’t have to be a professional singer to sing to your child. You can sing at all times of the day, and yes, even out of tune. Your child will love it, however you sing, as long as there is rhythm, as long as there is movement, as long as there is bonding, as long as there is contact. Of course, playing appropriate music is also very important.
Different rhythms from different cultures, the greater the variety of rhythms and types of music that your child is exposed to, the greater the brain growth, the greater the tolerance, the more enjoyment you child will have later on in life because your child will be more appreciative of different types of music.
Another component we put into the Baby’s Best Start course is that of swinging. What we mean by swinging is we have different rhymes like “see-saw… Margery daw… back and forth, back and forth,” different rhymes that we created all the way through. Some are traditional, some we created. Why? Because the child needs to move.
When we swing the child, the child is very small and the swinging should be done gently, but the swinging should still be there. We are stimulating far senses and near senses. Far senses are those that are stimulated by the environment, by hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and touching. Near senses are those that respond to what is happening inside the body, the vestibular system, the muscle tension, and more.
By swinging, we are mainly stimulating the near senses. The vestibular system is the first sensory system to develop and it is fully developed by six months after the birth. The vestibular system is a system inside the ear, which controls the sense of movement and balance. It is considered to be the most important influence on all the other sensory systems that the child has in the body and it greatly influences the ability to function in everyday life.
The vestibular system influences absolutely everything we do. It’s very, very important to develop the baby’s vestibular system as much as possible and as early as possible.
The vestibular system is the unifying system in our brain that modifies and coordinates information that is received from other systems. It’s a little bit like a traffic policeman who is coordinating all the movement on the road. It’s very important that this system, just inside the ear, is stimulated very greatly.
You can do this by swinging your child, if the child is old enough, between two parents on a swing outside, or in a playground on a merry-go-round. You can hold the child upside down, even from a very early age - I’d recommend from three months onwards when the child can hold the head by himself. Hold the legs very tightly, of course; you don’t want to drop your kid, but you can swing your child upside down. This has the additional effect of bringing oxygen to the brain, which is very important. The oxygen comes inside the blood that flows to the brain. This greatly stimulates brain growth. Anything you can do with swinging, with holding the child upside down develops the vestibular system and brain growth from an early age.
A few more words about the vestibular system; the vestibular system influences the autonomic nervous system. This explains why individuals may have problems breathing, or can develop nausea or irregular heart rates when the system is overwhelmed. This is why you get kids that are car sick. When their system is overwhelmed, it means the vestibular system needs further developing, for example.
Further ways of helping young babies develop the vestibular system is to move from side to side, to rock your baby on your lap, to rock from side to side to side, to rock from front to back. If you could make up any rhymes while you’re doing so, nice little rhymes that you are saying to the baby, “front to back, front to back, we’re having fun, front to back,” anything that will be rhythmic and fun while you’re doing it will help the baby develop his language ability at the same time.
You can lift your baby up in the air, and turn around and around while doing so. You can roll your baby from back to belly, and in both directions. You can simply trot around the house with your baby. While doing so, you’re developing the vestibular system. When I say “trot around the house,” I mean to walk around the house quickly in a very bouncy way. That gives great development to the vestibular system.
Okay, another thing that is very important is exposing children to counting at an early age. In fact, children have a natural sense of quantity. Research with newborn babies and infants show that they can tell the difference between numbers of objects, have arithmetical expectations, and they react strongly to experiments in which the outcomes are not possible from the point of view of arithmetic.
If they see that the outcome is impossible, the baby will react in a very strong manner. Children have expectations in mathematics. Right from birth, they seem to be born with some innate ability to understand quantity.
Glenn Doman, from the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, developed a methodology of teaching quantity to babies, really from a few weeks onwards. He says it really works well until the age of two-years old. It’s reddish dots on white cards. How does that work? It teaches counting by putting the correct amount of dots on the card.
If he wants to teach “1” he has one dot. If he wants to teach “2” he has two red dots etc. He could go up to “100” like this, in fact he does. Of course the parents flash the cards at the child while they’re seeing the correct amount of dots and say, “One, two, three, etc” or “eighty one, eighty two, eighty three, etc” so you can teach quantity in such a manner.
He also has a manner of teaching addition and subtraction but I’m not going into that here. If you want to teach quantities with babies, you can use red dots on white cards, no special arrangement; just stick the dots as you wish on the right card. I suggest sticking the dots, not drawing them; buying red dots, counting them out in advance so you know how many there are, and sticking them on. You can also buy them from Glenn Doman, as well, if you look him up on the Internet.
Our Baby’s Best Start course is actually a course for teaching English to babies, but it also helps cognitive development if the children and helps the bonding between parents and children.
One of the other aspects we use is baby sign language. The goal of baby sign language, unless of course the child is deaf, which most children aren’t, the reason for teaching baby sign language to hearing children is to better communicate with them.
Babies understand long before they can actually vocalize. Babies are very emotionally wise. They understand what they’re feeling and wish to express it long before they can vocalize. Baby sign language is a way of allowing the baby to tell the mother or father what he wants, without having to verbally say the word. He may have a sign for “frightened,” he may have a sign for “hungry,” he may have a sign for “hot,” so instead of just opening his mouth and screaming and crying, the baby can actually say what he feels. What a difference! How wonderful!
Babies can physically use sign language from the age of about seven or eight months upwards. It’s normally said that this is from the age in which babies can actually wave “good bye.” The research on this was initially done by two lady doctors, Dr. Linda Acredolo, and Dr. Susan Goodwin. It’s been taught to hearing babies worldwide today. There are many different baby sign languages; in fact, you can create your own. The most important thing is that you can understand what baby means.
Baby is becoming linguistically more developed because speech doesn’t have to be verbal speech. Sing language is a form of speech. It’s not body language. Bogy language is different. Body language is when you shake your head when you mean “no” or you start to squirm on your seat and people know you’re uncomfortable; I’m not talking about body language.
Baby sign language is actually instead of verbal speech. It’s something different. Research done by Drs. Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwin indicates that after three years of using baby sign language, in many different tests of language development, the baby signers did better than the baby non-signers. Furthermore, at the end of second grade in school, the baby sign graduates were still out performing their peers, in a standard IQ test, which means this extra linguistic input was developing their brains, not just showing their parents their needs. It was actually long-term, life-long brain development so baby sign language is a great plus for you as a parent and for your baby, for life.
These are just some tips, but enormous tips that came out of my research into Baby’s Best Start. There are many, many more. Maybe I’ll talk about them in future podcasts. I hope you take them further. Thank you.
Julian:
Hi, this is Julian. I will read the email questions that have come in over the last three weeks. This comes from Kataline. “I’m a parent in the Helen Doron Early English classes in Slovakia. I try to translate some of the lesson for my son into his native tongue so I’m sure he will understand the lesson. The teacher tells me not to translate for him, that he will automatically understand the English. How is this possible?”
Helen:
Thank you Kataline. It’s very interesting. I can see how important it is for you that your child learns English and that he understands, and you’re trying to make things as easy as possible for your child.
What’s important to understand is that the child’s brain is not like ours. The adult brain no longer has the natural capacity for learning language that the child brain does. The child’s brain is programmed, up to the age of about six, for language learning and after that the child, over the years, loses this natural ability. In fact, up to the age of six, the child’s brain is still developing and language centers in the brain are still being developed.
For example, if your child speaks the Slovak language, he will have a language in his brain just for this language. If this child learns English, through translation to Slovak, the child will not have a separate language center for English. English will actually be a translation of Slovak to him.
We want the child to learn the language like a mother tongue. The pathways in the brain can be created for the English language. Many more brain cells will be stimulated so that when your child speaks English at the age of ten, or twenty, or thirty, he is going straight to his English language center in his brain, and he’s not going via his mother tongue. In fact he is creating another mother tongue, a separate mother tongue for English.
It’s important not to translate. It’s not just not necessary, it’s actually important not to translate. How do our lessons work? Our lessons work because the child hears the language at home, again, and again, and again. In the class, the child sees the pictures and acts out what we’re doing. There are many ways of stimulating the senses so that the child absorbs the language naturally. In fact, children are kinesthetic creatures. They learn through movement. They learn through their senses. They learn through everything that comes in. It is not an intellectual process for them.
It’s very important to learn English through English, and that’s why we’ve trained our teachers so thoroughly, so that they can do it. Don’t worry; you’re being a good parent by not interfering. It’s fine. Just make sure the child hears the CD again, and again, and comes to the lessons regularly, and your child will do brilliantly.
Julian:
“My daughter is very shy and hardly speaks even her own language. I don’t want to force her to be more outgoing than she is in her nature. But then, how can she really get anything out of the English lessons if she doesn’t speak?
Helen:
There are two aspects to absorbing spoken language. One is hearing and one is speaking. The first aspect is understanding. First, the child absorbs, first the child understands, and then the child opens his mouth and speaks.
Some children are willing to take risks at an earlier age. They’re willing to speak much more, and even to make mistakes. Other children don’t want to make mistakes and they don’t open their mouths at all until they feel certain. Some children don’t speak their mother tongue until the age of three or four.
There is an old joke about Einstein. They say that Einstein didn’t speak until the age of three. I don’t know if this is true; this is how the joke goes, it’s how the legend goes. Anyway, the joke goes that Einstein, sitting at the table at the age of three, finally turns to his mother and says, “Please pass the salt.” He says it in perfect German. His mother says, “But you speak perfectly! Why didn’t you speak before?” He said, “Up to now, everything’s been okay.”
Children will speak when they need to. I understand there are speech therapists and parents get anxious and people do take their children at an early age to speech therapists. That’s fine. Do what you feel is correct and do what your doctor says is correct; however, in our lessons, we don’t force people to speak.
It’s okay. If the children don’t want to speak, they don’t. I’m talking about two-year olds, three-year olds. Clearly, if I have a six-year old that’s not speaking, I will be a little bit concerned, and we will be looking into it. We also have teachers who are very specially trained to elicit speech from the children by activities that the children really need to speak to be part of. It really works, so we have our own very special techniques for getting the older children interactive and speaking and doing so please don’t be concerned; it will work out. It will go fine in the lesson.
Julian:
“My son is five-years old and has ADHD. Is Helen Doron Early English the right type of method for him?”
Helen:
The answer is yes, big, big yes! Helen Doron Early English is exactly the right type of method for a five-year old. Your five-year old learns through moving. All children learn through moving, especially ADHD children. All children learn kinesthetically, that’s through movement, through sensory input, through the input of hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, and moving. This is how all children learn and most especially ADHD children. This is exactly how we teach.
I’ve no doubt that your child is extremely intelligent, extremely bright, doesn’t like to be bored by lessons. On the contrary, here we are - interactive lessons, no reason to be bored, a tremendous amount of movement. Yes, this is the class for your child.
Announcer:
That was Episode 2 of the Early Childhood Education podcast. Please find more episodes at the website www.helendoron.com, or at www.itunes.com. Don’t forget to send us your questions to podcast@helendoron.com. To finish this episode, please enjoy listening to Ella Doron singing one of the songs from Baby’s Best Start.