Children learn best when they are allowed to lead conversation and communicate their interest.
This is one of the lessons the participants are taking away from the on-going workshop, ‘ECCD-family partnership for inclusive classroom’.
Parents, caregivers and facilitators are organising the workshop to foster greater partnership in building a successful inclusive classroom.
Language and Speech Therapist from Singapore, Jean Ho is helping about 30 parents and facilitators by giving practical strategies to help children in classroom build language and social skills.
The Therapist said parents often do not allow their children to lead the conversation which hampers their language development.
“We find it that usually parents are the ones that lead the conversation but when this happens, the conversations are usually very short. And we know from research that when children lead the conversation, that’s when they learn language best.”
One of the techniques she uses is called OWL Technique which stands for Observe, Wait and Listen.
“So we find that when we observe what children do. We wait to see what their interest is and listen to what they are doing and let them take the initiation and follow on to their conversation. That’s when they give us lot of language and create lot of opportunities to learn.”
The workshop comes as a boon to parents and facilitators to help them understand the importance of working together in catering to a child’s early development.
“Communication is one of the developmental milestones that we need to focus on when working with small children, the age group that we work with. So that is why this workshop is important,” said one of the participants, Yangree.
Another participant, Thinley said the workshop introduced to them certain assessment tool and screening tool which will help them determine what part of developmental stage their child is.
