Understanding a child's learning process

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How a child thinks
Scientists speculating how babies acquire different skills and levels of intelligence used to debate the relative importance of genetics (what a child is born with) and the environment (what a child experiences in life) in influencing the child's progress in growth and development. The debate has gradually ceased to be relevant in the past two decades as scientists have discovered that an individual's genetic endowments interact continuously with his or her environment.

A child is genetically designed to feast on environmental experiences. Every sort of stimulation that a child is frequently exposed to -- from cuddling before bed to watching robins in flight to sorting baseball cards -- is part of the feast, and it's parents who contribute most to the banquet.

What's going on in that head of yours?
Until about the age of 10, a child's brain is a fireworks display of electrical activity. Your child comes equipped with about 100 billion brain nerve cells, called neurons. Shortly after birth, these nerve cells are busy emitting electrical pulses to construct connections to other neurons. The brain makes trillions more of these connections than your child will ultimately keep. The connections that endure are strengthened as they are used or stimulated by sensory experience. If the connection isn't used, the pathway withers and that particular connection can be lost. Myelinization is the process that occurs to neural connections as they become more stable. Specialized cells form a fatty, protective, insulating sheath around the nerve fibres.

Using Positron Emission Tomography (PET), a method of scanning the brain's activity by measuring its glucose consumption, researchers have found that by the age of three, a child's brain is more than twice as active as an adult's brain, and continues to be so until the age of 10. The PET scan also shows that the brain does not activate just one area when responding to stimuli, but retrieves knowledge or information from a complex web of neural connections.

Educators and neurobiologists believe that the activation of the web of connections explains why kids learn most effectively when they are given information about a particular topic in several different forms. A teacher of a Grade 2 class, for example, with the goal of having her students learn to identify robins, might read with them a story about robins, have them count the robins at a bird feeder, and then suggest they draw pictures of robins. The more places in their brains that they store information about robins, the greater the number of access routes they have to retrieve that information, and the more firmly the child retains that knowledge.

Creating the connections
The creation of the neural connections follows a developmental schedule, and there are critical ages or periods for a growing child to best understand particular concepts or to begin acquiring particular skills. The neural pathways that enable your child to see or to walk or to talk, for example, are already well established by the age of six.

The window of opportunity to become fluent in another language is also open widest between birth and the age of six. This doesn't mean that an older child or adult cannot learn a second or third language, just that she will never learn one as easily as when she was a young child. But rest assured that wiring the brain for language continues throughout childhood. Wiring the brain for music also has a critical period. The opportune time to begin learning to play an instrument is between the ages of three and seven.

Around puberty, the complex and explosive neural activity in a child's brain begins to slow down, and by the age of 16, the adolescent's brain development of neural connections levels off. New connections are made throughout life, but at a slower pace, and our capacity to learn continues. However skills and knowledge, once acquired, are maintained only through use and grow rusty or are lost through lack of use. The opportunities for learning and acquiring the associated neural connections are endless during childhood when the learning appears to be the most effortless.

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