We’ve heard that a picture paints a thousand words. When it comes to communicating with young minds, educators at Silver Spring daycare use those “thousand words” to great advantage. The use of graphic presentations, images, pictures, and animation, provides an effective in-class tool for communicating with young kids, especially in multi-lingual environments, and with young kids with diverse learning abilities. These (images, pictures, infographics) serve as universal language tools, and provide a way to deliver consistent learning to early learners.
Benefits of Classroom Graphics and Animation
Like adults, each child learns differently. That’s why administrators and staff at Silver Spring day care centers use a blend of teaching approaches to help learning and growth in children in their care. MCCA preschool programs implement the Creative Curriculum®, which uses a play-based, interactive approach to help multiple areas of learning and development – and one of the tools used is lively graphics and animation in the classroom environment.
Some of the benefits that early childhood education centers receive, from the use of impactful animation and presentation, includes:
- Attention grabbing: Lively imagery, artwork, pictures, and animation are attention-capturing, and are a great way to get the attention of – typically lively, often distracted – young kids to learning concepts being taught. And, once an educator has that attention, a child’s mind is more open to absorbing learning and behavior modification.
- Simplifying content: While teachers and educators at a Silver Spring day school are trained and experienced at verbal communication, and can also communicate effectively through gestures and expressions; the use of animation and graphics goes a long way to simplify complex concepts and topics – such as counting or word-object associations. “Telling” a child about additions is one thing – but illustrating the concept through graphics and animation is more effective.
- Retention boosting: As children watch graphical and animated versions of verbal or text-based learning repeatedly, they use a range of senses to process and understand what they’re watching/viewing. This accelerates both visual and auditory senses, encouraging the brain to make vital connections between animated and pictorial content – even with no audio involved. These cement learning concepts into their minds better than verbal or text-only learning.
Finally, unlike textual or verbal instructions, animation and graphical presentations can help young learners make sense of multiple dimensions – time, space, location, shape, size, color – of learning objects, characters, and situations. Overall, this gives them a better learning experience than an educator-led verbal learning session.
Making Graphic and Animation a Success
Merely creating “simplified” graphics and animation won’t help. Before exposing young minds to the substance of those tools, educators must help young learners understand how to interpret and make sense of them. For instance, an exceptionally well-created infographic about counting may not do much good unless the child knows how to “read” each block of the picture, and understands how the picture “flows”, and how each block must be “pieced” together.
Silver Spring day care centers don’t use animation and graphics as a substitute to in-class vocal, verbal or educator expression-based learning. Instead, staff and teachers use them to supplement traditional in-class learning, with animated and graphical tools. By reinforcing verbally imparted difficult-to-comprehend, and text-heavy concepts, with age-appropriate graphics and animation, educators help learners make sense of those concepts in ways that verbal explanations can’t.
