How ‘Learning Through Play’ can improve Nigeria’s early childhood education

Experts opines that play is the natural language of childhood learning development, as water is natural to every aquatic animal. They say that through play, children imagine, express, explore and understand the world around them.

According to Mari Payne, the deputy managing director and senior director education and outreach, Sesame Workshop International South Africa (SWISA), “From birth to age six, when the brain develops rapidly, play offers rich experiences that accelerate the physical, cognitive and socio-emotional growth of a child.

“The challenge though, is that educators and caregivers do not always see the value of play or its link with learning.”

In its quest to ensuring early childhood learning deficiency is eradicated in Nigeria, the Jolly Phonics learning approach was introduced to early childhood caregivers by the Universal Learning Solutions (ULS) in collaboration with Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC).

Jolly Phonics is a modern learning mechanism that helps children learn to read and write through a systematic programme. With Jolly Phonics children learn the main 42 sounds of English, not just the alphabet sounds. Besides, they learn to blend sounds to form words and then to read.

And this obviously becomes more effective through play amid learning. For adults, playing may be limited to just a cathartic exercise that helps to unwind.

“However, playing is critical for children as it helps develop essential skills that will last a lifetime,” experts say.

Elizabeth Ohaka, a ULS trainer, explained that Jolly Phonics is meant to expose young teachers to a better way of inculcating the acts and arts of reading and writing in children.

“The aim is to learn the context of the sentences and stories to help master the nuts and bolts of literacy. Jolly Phonics pulls the words apart into sounds before blending them together into the whole word.

“The idea is that children will then begin to automatically blend their phonemes. It’s fun, quick, multi-sensory and effective,” Ohaka said.

“Jolly Phonic training is addressing the dearth of reading amongst many Nigerian children by the funs it brings to learning. And without mixing words that is what Nigeria need now in the education system to boost reading and writing,” she added.

Because Learning Through Play (LTP) is a critical vehicle for education and advancing childhood development; education experts are encouraging caregivers and educators to equip themselves with the knowledge of how learning through play benefits children’s holistic development.

Jolly Phonics, teaches children to read and write using synthetic phonics, which is widely recognised as the most effective way to teach children to read and write in English. That was over 25 years ago.

Today Jolly Phonics is now used in over 100 countries worldwide. It is a system that provides learners with a seven-year school programme that teaches not only phonics, but spelling, punctuation and grammar too.

The Jolly Phonic teaching approach is multi-sensory and active, with fun actions, stories and songs. It embraces independent research which has helped the programme achieve outstanding results around the world. This style of learning continues to revise and extend children’s phonic knowledge; flexible and easy to implement in schools and developed by teachers for teachers

It is a comprehensive programme, based on the proven, fun and muliti-sensory synthetic phonics method that gets children reading and writing from an early age. This means that we teach letter sounds as opposed to the alphabet.

These 42 letter sounds are phonic building blocks that children, with the right tools, use to decode the English language. When reading a word, they recognise the letters and blend together the respective sounds; when writing a word they identify the sounds and write down the corresponding letters.

These skills are called blending and segmenting. These are two of the five skills that children need to master phonics:

Learning the letter sounds: Children are taught 42 letter sounds, which is a mix of alphabet sounds (1 sound – 1 letter) and digraphs (1 sound – 2 letters) such as sh, th, ai and ue. Using a multi-sensory approach each letter sound is introduced with fun actions, stories and songs.

Jolly Phonics teach the letter sounds in 7 groups of 6 letters at a pace of 4-5 sounds a week. Children can start reading after the first group of letters have been taught and should have been introduced to all the 42 letter sounds after 9 weeks at school.

Learning letter formation: This is taught alongside the introduction of each letter sound. Typically, children will learn how to form and write the letters letter down during the course of the lesson.

Blending: Once the first few letter sounds are learnt, children begin blending the sounds together to help them read and write new words.

Segmenting: When children start reading words, they also need to start identifying the phonic components that make the word sound the way it does. By teaching blending and segmenting at the same time children become familiar with assembling and breaking down the sounds within words.

Tricky words These are words with irregular parts, such as ‘who’ and ‘I’. Children learn these as exceptions to the rules of phonics. Introducing the common tricky words early in the year increases reading fluency (as they frequently occur in those first simple sentences you might expect them to read).

Alongside these skills children are also introduced to the main alternative spelling of vowels. These five skills form the foundation that children build on with each year of grammar teaching.