Early Learning and Students’ Skill Development

Young children are actively observing their world and learning from it from the moment of birth. A child’s early years play a crucial role in shaping their future. For children to grow into healthier, more resilient people, a strong foundation must be laid throughout these years. Early childhood education plays a vital role in moulding a child’s personality. When you hear the word education, most parents naturally think of academic excellence, which is undoubtedly important, but education isn’t just restricted to that alone.

In today’s fast-paced world where academic scores are more important than life skills, learning valuable life skills is most important to a child’s physical and mental development. Apart from excelling academically, it is essential for a child to acquire skills that help him improve the physical, artistic, and emotional aspects of life and survive in this competitive world.

Life skills are a set of basic values acquired through formal education or practical life experience. The development of life skills is crucial for achieving success in one’s life. All of these skills are necessary for the 21st century not just for a healthy society but also for successful individuals to achieve success. As a result, it’s important to start skill development programs at an early age.

Importance of skill development at an early age in school education

• The skill development process helps students think beyond grades. It helps them tap into their capabilities, develop real-life skills, and prepare themselves to be successful in the careers of their choice.
• Skill-based learning improves employability and helps the youth earn more. Furthermore, it improves the economy of a country and promotes its financial growth.
• Students’ leadership abilities are boosted by learning skill development since it makes them more selfless. They develop leadership abilities as they learn to organise and motivate their teams using their expertise.
• Skill-based learning focuses on the evaluation and application of facts to real-life problems. It also helps students develop creativity, critical thinking, and analytical thinking.

Skill-based curriculum

A skill-based curriculum empowers children as readers, writers, critical thinkers, and mathematicians to become creative, well-informed, passionate, and joyful learners and citizens of the world. Children are independent thinkers, and they are ready to begin their journey of learning and discovery. The skill-based curriculum is so flexible, we can continuously push every student at their own speed.

Vibitha Babu, a pre-primary teacher at Mukundapuram Government LP School comments, “We mainly focus on promoting the abilities of children. More than their curriculum, we include such activities as music, art, dance, games, and extra activities to make them happy. In the school curriculum, worksheets are included which give importance to the various developmental areas of the child. They are physical conduction development, language development, cognitive development, creative and aesthetic development, and social-emotional development.  Children’s interests are varied, so activities are done according to their interests. Along with that, the basic disciplines to be followed are also taught to them. How to behave during prayer, eating etiquette, etc. Not all children have the same learning ability. Thus, children who need special attention are given time to understand.”

“Children’s educational life starts from play school.  We are following the Montessori method of teaching. The first thing we provide to kindergarten children is practical life skill-oriented education. Children can develop their confidence only if they are independent. At the kindergarten level, we provide practical life-oriented activities to develop the confidence level of the child. The activities like tying shoelaces, buttoning the dress, brushing, bathing, washing, toilet use, pouring activities, etc, in the play classes. We provide motor skill activities for students in LKG classes, making models with clay works, colouring, scribbling, and similarly, for sorting activities, give children beads of different colours and sort them. They don’t need to use their full fingers while doing these kinds of activities. They do the activity using only the first three fingers. We use these three fingers for writing. Therefore, such activities make children’s writing easy. But what happens if you don’t give children these kinds of activities and teach them to write directly? However, children’s muscles are all very soft at this age. That’s why they feel pain when they hold the pencil. When they feel pain, they never follow those activities again. Similarly, by providing day celebration activities, it helps to develop children’s skills.” says Sarika P A, KG Co-ordinator, ICT English Medium High School, Peringala, Aluva.  

The skill-based learning in the school curriculum encourages holistic skill development which will enhance creativity, enable them to their own strengths and weaknesses at an early stage, gain confidence to think independently in a critical and analytical way, inculcates leadership skills and increases their willingness to experiment which also enables them to accept failures in a graceful manner. Eventually, the country’s workforce will benefit from this as students will grow up to become employable.