Learning Is About More Than Just Reading and Writing
When children struggle at school, it’s easy to focus on reading, writing, spelling, or maths.
But learning is built on many different foundations.
If a child finds it difficult to sit still, focus, listen, remember information, or coordinate their movements, classroom learning can feel much harder than it should.
These underlying skills often develop through everyday play, movement, relationships, and exploration long before children start school.
When we understand the foundations that support learning, we can better understand why some children thrive in the classroom while others may need a little more support.
Sense of Balance
A well-developed sense of balance will help your child to listen, sit up straight, focus and pay attention, listen, sit still and take their eyes away from the horizon to read a page of text.
Reading difficulties, such as dyslexia, and ADHD-type behaviours, are often linked to immaturities in the sense of balance.
Sense of Vision
Good visual skills are essential for classroom learning, such as reading and writing. Your child’s eyes need to be able to work together as a team, and interpret the written symbols on the page.
Listening (Auditory Processing)
You know your child can hear, but how well can they listen? Can they tune out background sounds and focus on the teacher’s voice? Will they struggle to listen in a noisy room?
Memory
A good memory is essential for learning to read, to be able to memorise those small sounds with in words, and follow instructions.
Gross Motor Skills (the big muscles)
Strong leg, arm, tummy and back muscles will help your child to maintain a good posture for learning, to sit still and focus in the classroom
Fine Motor Skills (the smaller muscles)
These little muscles develop after the bigger muscles, and will help your child hold a pencil and maintain focus while moving their eyes together across a page of writing.
Hand-eye Coordination
Your child’s eyes need to be able to work together and follow their hand movements in order to be able to write neatly and legibly and catch a ball
Sense of Touch
Our sense of touch helps us to connect to others, and also ourselves. It is an important sense for forming relationships, developing an awareness of feelings, empathy (noticing how others might be feeling)
Communication Skills
Good communication skills help with forming friendships, bringing thought to words, especially in creative writing tasks, and making meaning from written texts.
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