ABSTRACT
‘Learning’ is a broad term that covers almost everything we do. We learn about our family; we learn to make a friend; we learn to move and to speak, to sing, and to laugh and to cry. We learn to remember and to forget, to love and to hate, to rejoice and to despair. Learning begins even before we are born and carries on until we die. How we do this is guided by the competences and temperamental traits we have inherited, by the motivation we have to learn more things and by the sharing of the family beliefs, structures and environmental experiences in which we grow. This is known as social transmission. Learning is an active process – a kind of interactive partnership between children, the family, and its wider social network that includes nurseries, family and children's centres, and eventually schools. This environment is the setting in which children learn to interact and build on their initial understandings and experiences in increasingly complex ways. Development happens when the body and brain work together to make new thinking and learning, and therefore new achievements, possible. Some children will learn at an amazing speed, others will take longer and they will all have their own preferred ways. When adults choose to intervene to teach them something, they have to gauge the child's readiness to absorb the ‘instructions’ necessary to allow them to carry out a new task. This is what makes observation and assessment, i.e. finding what makes each child tick, so complex but so fascinating.
Q: There are so many skills and competences that children must tackle. How can we keep track of them all?
