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How does the age factor of kindergarten students make them effective learners? I shall explore this question in the present essay. Kindergarten children, below age 5, make for excellent learners of language. This is true due to various reasons. About 90 per cent of brain development is completed before the age of 5 years. This accounts for more development than at any other stage in life. Although children have all the neurons they will have for the rest of their lives, it is the connections established between the neurons that count. Connections are a result of learning new information. The more information and stimulation the child is exposed to, the more connections will be established. Repetitive information will only help strengthen those connections making learning more permanent. Those areas of the brain that are stimulated more will grow and retain information better and for longer and experiences had in early childhood have a lasting effect on the person throughout his/her life. A well know proverb states this beautifully; learning in childhood is like engraving in stone. Neurons of the brain also work by a ‘use it or loose it' policy. Which means if the child is not exposed to certain information or stimulation, the synapses that would have recorded that information will be ‘pruned' or cleared off. Children will learn the English language similar to the way they learn their mother tongue. If they are exposed to more that basic vocabulary and simple grammar, they will absorb it fairly easily. Even if they are not able to reproduce it immediately, early exposure will bear fruits in later stages of development. Activities planned for young children must foster all areas of development. According to EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) there are seven areas of development. Namely, communication and language development, physical development, personal, social and emotional development, literacy development, mathematics, understanding the world and expressive art and design. Children are active participants in their own learning. They are naturally curious about their environment and are constantly absorbing information from around them like a dry sponge absorbs water. They will, comparatively, easily be able to pick up sounds of English phonetics that don't exist in their native language. They might even pick up the teacher's accent! Activities designed for children must also stimulate all of their senses. For example, the letter ‘a' can be taught by narrating a story about the letter using pictures, showing them flashcards of the words that start with ‘a’, having them write it in the sand, or hunt for it in the sand or magazine cut-out. They can be taught a rhyme that talks about the letter and asked to look around them for things that they think start with ‘a'. Some other considerations that the teacher must keep in mind are that children have very short attention spans. Thus activities must not be longer that 10-15 minutes. The more fun the children are having the more the learning is going to stick. Transition activities can be used to help children shift their attention from one unrelated activity to the next. Kindergarteners can also be encouraged to talk and participate in group discussions giving them opportunity to use whatever language they am have learned. To conclude, it is never too early to teach children new language. As stated above, the best time to acquire a new language is the early childhood stage.
