The Senses

From the time an infant is born until about the age of two, a newborn baby learns mostly by sight, followed by hearing, and touch. In fact, about

46% of the information is taken in by sight,

35% through touch,

19% through hearing,

        And the other senses are used to take in

        other forms of information.

As a child grows older, s/he tends to prefer one or more of these sensory inputs for taking in information and will actually learn better, and retain more, if the information is being presented in the preferred sensory mode.

Not only do we use the senses to take in information, each child uses preferred modes of learning and taking in information. For some, learning is best when done in a social situation with others. Other children tend to learn best alone, preferring  a quiet place to do individual reading or discovery. Still others, can remember any tune they ever heard or repeat back the words to you after only hearing a song a couple of times so if music is paired with learning, the chances of them acquiring, and keeping the information is greater.

Patterns

A second important concept to remember about the

brain is that it is always trying to make sense out of the

information that it is taking in. To do this, it seeks a pattern

in what it is seeing (hearing, tasting, touching, smelling).

The brain tries to pair the information it is taking in to

information it already knows. For example, let’s say you

are trying to teach a preschooler the concept of wet and dry. If you introduce those words to the preschooler without any prior understanding of what those words represent, they will have no meaning to the child. But if those words are paired with examples of taking a bath (wet) and drying off with a towel (dry), the child can then pair the new words with the actual experiences. That is why it is so important to pair sensory information to new information for very young children. Ideally, to teach concepts of wet and dry, a child would be given a bucket of water and towel.

Let me give you an example of how that works. I want you to answer the following questions out loud, giving your first response without thinking: