Language arts is one of the most critical components in any youngster’s educational training. It encompasses the various ways that people communicate including speaking, writing, and reading. Although having many different facets, language arts is a holistic way of being able to effectively listen, communicate, and comprehend messages, which people send and receive.
The goal of any language arts program is to help children to adapt to their surroundings and to understand how to express themselves productively. It is also to learn how to interpret the incoming messages that they receive from their environment. Although a combination of many disciplines, there are four targeted goals that any great language arts curriculum should have.
Learning to Listen
The way that children learn to make sense of their environment is by interpreting incoming messages, taking that information and processing it. Learning to listen is the key to acquiring the necessary content to get to the final stage of processing. Listening is not an innate skill, but one that must be learned through a child’s environment. It is reinforced by teachers, parents and other people they encounter. Learning to listen isn’t just about hearing words or verbal cues that are being sent, but also deciphering nonverbal cues, like signs and signals that need to be interpreted as well.
Learning to Speak
For a child to communicate with their surroundings, they must learn to speak. Not just about vocabulary, a child needs to know about situational speech, like what is informal, versus formal conversation, and which voice to use appropriately in context. The key component of teaching the art of speaking is to help children concentrate on how to effectively communicate their thoughts through the use of both verbal and nonverbal cues, so that they can be heard and understood.
Learning to Read
Although a higher skill, reading is an essential component of language arts. When children learn that they can express their ideas in writing, it opens another whole modality of communication. Not just about reading the thoughts and ideas of other people around them, they learn that they can express their own thoughts, imagination, and creativity through words that other people can likewise read and understand.
Learning to Write
One of the hardest things for children to learn is how to communicate their verbal thoughts through writing. There is a precise manner to effectively writing down your words so that they can be read and understood. The first form of writing they can initiate in is drawing pictures. As their proficiency in word structures and spelling increase, those pictures can be extrapolated upon and explained in the written word.
The process of communication from one human to another is a skill that continues to develop throughout life. Language arts, taught at the primary level, is the precursor that sets a child up to learn to understand and communicate with their surroundings and is the basis for success to manipulate and survive in any atmosphere.
The new paradigm in teaching children to succeed in a changing workforce is STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, none of which are possible without the basic understanding and development of language arts, which is an art in itself. Rockin Resources has all the tools necessary to develop the basic and advanced skills that a child needs to adapt to and communicate with the world around them.
Another article that might interest you: Why Language Arts is Integral to STEM