The Right Moves

Explore,learn,grow… move beyond the conventional and teach the toddlers the way they want to be taught,” smiles Kornelia Janiak,a visiting faculty from Poland,as we take seat at the The British School,Sector 44,where she’s currently engrossed in teaching them Duck Dance (called the Basin Dance in Poland) in water. “It’s dance,expression,imagination and English all rolled in one,” she reels,as she demonstrates the learning effect. One hour and they have learnt new English words with there meanings by heart,all thanks to the songs. “Music penetrates the young mind faster and increases the recall value,dance keeps them active and water in this case is just a medium for them to have more fun,” she points out that the model has been successful not only in Poland,but also in Ireland and Singapore.

Janiak has been globetrotting to work on children’s growth and development and study their pattern,learning sequence and preferences according to age. “Children progress in several areas including physical growth,capacity for language,comprehension and in skill of interaction if they feel involved. Children need to move in order to master body control,they need to explore,manipulate objects and repeat action to exercise their mental,social and manual skills,” she cites her learning experience from the International Teacher Exchange Programmes where she’s been dealing with children in the age of three and 12. “Rhymes and poems worked for them best. But then you need to experiment with the group to see what interests them. For toddlers try playing with balloons,it worked well here,” she moves to get the children out of the water,but not before leaving us with a sound piece of advice: “The idea is to make learning fun and not have children running away from it.” Point taken!