Skills
HAND-EYE COORDINATION
Hand-eye coordination is the ability to track the movements of the hands with the eyes, thus enabling the eyes to send important signals to the brain about hand movement. Poor hand-eye coordination can greatly compromise your ability to exercise and can also affect everyday tasks such as writing. A good hand-eye coordination also helps to excel in racquet sports like tennis, badminton, squash and other sports like hockey and cricket.
SENSORY SKILLS
Sensory skills are the act of seeing, smelling, touching, tasting and hearing to better engage in daily activities. Research shows that sensory play builds nerve connections in the brain, which leads to the child’s ability to complete more complex learning tasks. Sensory play supports language development, cognitive growth, fine and gross motor skills, problem solving skills, and social interaction and aids in developing and enhancing memory. Sensory play is great for calming an anxious or frustrated child and helps children learn sensory attributes (hot, cold, dry, wet etc.)
FINE MOTOR SKILLS
Fine motor skills are small movements that use the small muscles of the fingers, toes, wrists, lips, and tongue. With the development of these skills, a child is able to complete important tasks such as writing, feeding oneself, buttoning and zippering.
CREATIVITY & IMAGINATION
Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Imagination is the door to possibilities. It is where creativity, ingenuity, and thinking outside the box begin for child development. Imaginative and creative play is how children learn about the world. During imaginative play, children manipulate materials, express themselves verbally and non-verbally, plan, act, interact, react, and try different roles. Great opportunities for learning are possible when children participate in creative play with dolls, vehicles, blocks, rocks, cardboard, or boxes. Imagination and creativity are also skills that our children will need when they join the workforce of the future.
LIFE SKILLS
Life skills are abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable humans to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life; in other words, psychosocial competency. They are a set of human skills acquired via teaching or direct experience that are used to handle problems and questions commonly encountered in daily human life. Life skills are usually associated with managing and living a better quality of life. They help us to accomplish our ambitions and live to our full potential. The subject varies greatly depending on social norms and community expectations but skills that functions for well-being and aid individuals to develop into active and productive members of their communities are considered as life skills. Developing life skills are especially important in the case of urban Indian children, who are normally not expected to do their own work e.g. cleaning up dishes after eating or assembling own toys using tools and can be found really wanting in certain critical life-situations later on in life e.g. reading traffic signals, assembling furniture etc.
GROSS MOTOR SKILLS
Gross motor skills are the bigger movements that use the large muscles in the arms, legs, torso, and feet-activities such as rolling over and sitting. Gross motor skills are important to enable children to perform every day functions, such as walking and running, playground skills(e.g. climbing) and sporting skills (e.g. catching, throwing and hitting a ball with a bat).
MEMORY AND COGNITIVE SKILLS
Cognitive Skills are defined as the ability of an individual to perform the various mental activities most closely associated with learning and problem solving. Examples include verbal, spatial, psychomotor, and processing-speed ability. Cognition mainly refers to things like memory, the ability to learn new information, speech, understanding of written material.
Early childhood is when most people are best able to absorb and use new information. In this period, children learn new words, concepts, and various methods to express themselves
SENSORY SKILLS
Sensory skills are the act of seeing, smelling, touching, tasting and hearing to better engage in daily activities. Research shows that sensory play builds nerve connections in the brain, which leads to the child’s ability to complete more complex learning tasks. Sensory play supports language development, cognitive growth, fine and gross motor skills, problem solving skills, and social interaction and aids in developing and enhancing memory. Sensory play is great for calming an anxious or frustrated child and helps children learn sensory attributes (hot, cold, dry, wet etc.)
STEM
STEM education is an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to learning that provides hands-on and relevant learning experiences for students. STEM teaching and learning goes beyond the mere transfer of knowledge. It engages students and equips them with critical thinking, problem solving, creative and collaborative skills, and ultimately establishes connections between the school, work place, community and the global economy. STEM also helps students understand and apply math and science content, the foundations for success in college and careers.
Our current Indian education system has adapted less as compared to the fast changes in the global education arena. Indian education system is very specific to age groups, focuses more on text book learning and function on prebuilt versions of limited experiential learning. Education here is primarily seen as a mechanism to reach to the end goal, i.e. crafting a career & getting a job. This is more so due to lack of a holistic STEM curriculum which focuses on development through learning & fun.