What are foundational skills?
Foundational skills are the basic skills that need to be taught and developed first and foremost. These skills are the foundations that hold our learning ability together.
Foundational skills include
- Concentration
- Visual, auditory and haptic perception (also called processing)
- Short- and long-term memory (both visual and auditory)
- Decoding and integration of information
- Reasoning and logical thinking
- Sensory motor integration
- Fine and gross motor coordination.
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Once these foundational skills have been taught and developed, additional skills can then be learned.
These skills may not seem important at first, but are oftentimes the reason why some children battle to learn and grasp new concepts, while others don’t. It is not that some children have special skills and others don’t. It’s a matter of how well their foundational skills have been developed to start with.
Some children are faster at learning these foundational skills, while others may need a bit more time. The key for the slower learners is to keep persevering, and for parents and teachers to ensure that all learners become equipped with these foundational skills.
Edublox develops foundational skills
Edublox is a system of mental exercises designed to teach, develop and improve foundational skills. From small concerns, to larger ones that require more attention, the Edublox system helps learners to build a solid foundation:
- Concentration problems can affect many areas of one’s life. The child with concentration problems might have trouble listening, or he might be unable to learn. Concentration is a very important foundational skill and is therefore prioritized in every Edublox lesson.
. - While sensation is the pickup of information by our sensory receptors, for example the eyes, ears, skin, nostrils, and tongue, perception is the interpretation of what is sensed. A classic perceptual problem is the inability to distinguish between the letters p, q, d and b, but there are also many other perceptual problems that can impact a child’s learning ability. An inability to analyze, for example, can have an adverse effect on spelling. Edublox teaches perceptual skills through a variety of visual, auditory and haptic exercises.
. - Through a variety of exercises Edublox improves visual and auditory short- and long-term memory. For example, a learner will be given a few seconds to look at a pattern consisting of colored blocks. The pattern will then be covered and the learner will be required to rebuild the pattern, based on his short-term memory. As the learners’ memory improve, the complexity of the pattern is increased.
. - Edublox teaches reasoning and logical thinking. It has been proven that specific training in logical thinking processes can make people “smarter.” Logical thinking allows a child to reject quick answers, such as “I don’t know,” or “this is too difficult,” by empowering them to delve deeper into their thinking processes and understand better the methods used to arrive at a solution and even the solution itself.
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