Teachers and other specialists in early childhood education recognize that children develop at different rates. Given anything that resembles a well-rounded life — with adults and other children to listen to, talk to, do things with — their minds will acquire naturally all the skills required for further learning. Take for example, reading. The two strongest predictors of whether children will learn to read easily and well at school am whether they have learned the names and the sounds of letters of the alphabet before they start school, That may seem to imply that letter names and sounds should be deliberately taught to young children, because these skills will not happen naturally. But in all the research programs where they have done just that—instructed children, rehearsed the names and sounds over and over — the results are disappointing. The widely accepted explanation is that knowledge of the alphabet for it to work in helping one to read, has to be deeply embedded in the child' s mind. That comes from years of exposure and familiarity with letters, from being read to, from playing with magnetic letters, drawing said fiddling with computers. So parents can do some things to help, although many do these things spontaneously. Instead of reading a story straight through, the reader should pause every so often and ask questions but not questions which can be answered by a yes or no. Extend their answers, suggest alternative possibilities and pose progressively more challenging questions. And with arithmetic do not explicitly sit down and teach children about numbers, but all those early years count when walking up steps. Recite nursery rhymes. Talk to children. Say this is a red apple, that is a green one, Please get three eggs out of the fridge for me The technical term in vogue for this subtle structuring of children' s early learning is 'scaffolding'. Based on recent extensions of the work of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky the idea is that there arc things a child may be almost ready to do. Anna, for example, cannot tie a shoelace by herself, but if an adult or a competent child forms one of the loops for her, she will soon learn to do the rest. Applying this concept to older children, one wonderful teacher has her children keep lists of 'Words I can Almost Spell'. While this has all the hallmarks of common sense, it represents a significant change of emphasis from the idea of Piaget, which have dominated the theory of early childhood learning. The child in Piaget' s theory looks, more than anything, like a lime scientist — exploring the environment, observing, experimenting, thinking and slowly coming to his or her conclusions about how the world works. The image is of a rather solitary pursuit with ail the real action in the child' s head. The Vygotsky model re-introduces all the people who also inhabit the child' s world — parents, care-givers, relatives, siblings and ail those other children at play or school. They are not simply noise, clattering in the background while the child' s developing mind struggles on its own. The cognitive development of the child, that is, the learning of colors or numbers or letters — depends on learning how to interact socially, how to learn from the people (as well as the things) in the environment. What is important is that the child develops the range of social skills — being able to express a preference, knowing how to take rams, being able to stand up for themselves, being able to get into a group, being able to make decisions, being able to share, having confidence to go off on their own. These all require careful nurturing, No one is telling parents not to think about their children' s development It is just that it is more important to think about a child' s desire to chat and the importance of social behavior. and play activity, than the actually more trivial markers of intellectual achievement s