Brain-Based Learning

Preschool Activities That Support Brain Development

Simple, everyday activities in preschool contribute to young kids’ brain growth at a critical period in their development.

May 17, 2021

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The human brain is constantly changing with every experience and interaction. Although experience-responsive brain growth occurs throughout our lives, and the brain’s most rapid growth occurs during gestation, there’s an intense second period of accelerated growth between ages 2 and 5. The brain responds particularly robustly to learning experiences, environmental influences, and emotional interactions during these childhood years. This is where preschool teachers come in.

These structural changes, reflected in children’s accelerating understanding skills, and in their cognitive, social, and emotional maturation, are the result of neuroplasticity, which is the activation of a group of neurons connected in a memory circuit that makes the connections stronger. That is the amazing process of learning. Neuroplasticity generates these changes in neural networks in response to knowledge and experience, enhanced by each new and repeated activation of the network.

Developing Executive Functions

The prefrontal cortex is where neural networks of executive function are especially rapid in neuroplastic-responsive construction from ages 2 to 5. These include attention focus, emotional self-awareness, and emotional self-regulation, as well as empathy, adaptability, and goal-directed behaviors. This means that the activation of a developing circuit such as emotional self-regulation (raising one’s hand before calling out) makes that skill stronger. Self-regulation will more likely be the response when the child practices it and receives positive feedback for waiting before reacting—for example, thinking before saying a first reactive response to a classmate who calls them a mean name.

These are the thoughtful decision-making skills that build as children are guided with experiences and feedback that promote social and emotional executive function network skills.

Social and Emotional Network Development

Since the strength of children’s executive function networks is a strong predictor of school readiness, including the development of literacy and numeracy, as well as social and emotional and academic competence, let’s look at interventions that can enhance the strengthening of these networks during early childhood.

Attention Focus and Goal-Directed Behaviors

This skill set is what children need to persevere when facing the challenges and setbacks natural to the processes of developing literacy, building successful collaboration skills, and achieving emotional self-management. When children are prompted to predict what they’ll need to do next or in an upcoming situation—for example, what type of voice they’ll use when they get to the library or what supplies they’ll need to keep a new goldfish healthy—they activate goal-planning neural networks. There are many opportunities to help children build their delay of gratification or other impulse controls.

With any of these activities, it’s very important to help students recognize their progress.

It takes guided experiences and frequent opportunities over time for children to enhance their neural network control systems of emotional self-awareness and self-management. It’s helpful if the teacher is tuned in to the children’s changes in mood, behavior, friendships, and joy, and takes time to privately and even playfully depict dolls and action figures in similar situations and considers ways to change the reaction and situation.

Teacher efforts will be translated in the children’s brains into strong, durable, efficiently retrievable neural networks, and students will be able to use these valuable skills for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

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  • Pre-K

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