We all love to get ready and dress up for certain occasions. We even enjoy our time picking out distinctive garments or accessories for preferred gatherings. Once we feel prepared or ready for our presentation, the confidence reflects in our social behaviour & body language. In the same way, readiness skills are a prime area of concern for educators. If the children are ready to adapt to the constant challenging environment around them, it makes their life peaceful & uncomplicated.

      During the child’s early years, the brain develops in rapid & fundamental ways and connections amongst neurons are reinforced. Because of this, early childhood is a window of both great risks of vulnerability to disruption and great potential for the impact of positive developmental influences. We take care of them later. This allows us, the educators, to expand & further develop a child’s skills in the specific areas of social interaction, language, emotional development, physical skills, literacy & fine motor skills.

     Readiness is a student’s entry point relative to a particular concept or skill at a given time. We, the educators, ask ourselves, “How ready is the child for this task, today ?” To differentiate responses, we construct a task as per their level of interpretation & different levels of complexity. There are 5 key areas of development in children – 

1. Gross motor skills e.g. jumping, running, etc
2. Fine motor skills e.g. drawing
3. Speech & language
4. Cognitive & intellectual e.g. counting, coding, etc
5. Social & emotional skills e.g. playing with other children & expressing feelings.

Taking into consideration all these 5 crucial milestones, let’s take a PEEK at the 4 types of readiness to learn & how we inculcate them in our children.

1. Physical readiness – This involves different gross motor activities in our sports area which not only takes care of physical fitness but also physical ability to be ready to learn. We also enhance this by taking certain physical activities in the classroom to explain a particular concept or its reinforcement. E.g. In math, making pairs or sets with friends in class or In English, treasure hunting of particular objects of sounds. These are just a few examples of how we create enthusiasm in learners.
2. Emotional readiness – The learner must be emotionally ready to learn in order to interpret the knowledge in practical situations in the world. There are some key factors of emotional readiness that we take into consideration such as anxiety level, support system, motivation, risk-taking behaviour, frame of mind, etc. To assess these factors, we have a team of professional educators along with a psychologist team who helps children to meet their emotional as well as special needs. We regularly observe & help out with a diverse set of activities to enhance learning through emotional readiness. 
3. Experimental readiness – This refers to the learner’s past experiences with learning, style of learning & how it affects their future in learning. We, at LWI, keep in touch with parents to know the extent to which the child is growing outside the school environment. We provide them with a positive experience in accomplishing certain tasks. E.g Free play in the big atrium is the experimental readiness which we tried in recent years with great success.

We use the globalized educational approach & experiment the learning in successive ways. We, as educators, believe in upgrading ourselves to meet the demand of growing civilization. Our online learning in pandemic said it all when we could proudly announce the level achieved in all areas of development. This is how we try & experiment with new techniques to develop experimental readiness among them.

4. Knowledge readiness – In today’s era, children are exposed to a lot of knowledgeable content before coming to school. This generation requires modern skills & tools. To develop knowledge readiness, we take care of certain things such as pre-writing skills development through tracing patterns & pattern writing, fine motor skills activities such clay moulding, sand tracing, and starch painting. We provide a variety of such activities which makes the children’s knowledge ready & adaptive. 

     You can be certain looking at the pictures, that our children at LWI thoroughly enjoy learning in a positive environment & they shine out to be achievers in various fields making them equipped for their needs in future as they deserve a little extra…..

       Happy learning !!