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Back to Basics: Ensuring Your Child Gets the Right Start for 2025

Back to Basics: Ensuring Your Child Gets the Right Start for 2025

| Confidence | Learning Framework

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Earlier this week Corey Duffy over at the ACB‘s Parenting and Education desk published a summary of a few important things going on in education across the country.

The piece covers a few things, including last year’s NAPLAN report and the uncomfortable truth that as many as a third of Australian children aren’t meeting the minimum benchmark.

Some of this is down to changes made in 2023 in how NAPLAN reports and ranks results, but it’s still far too many young learners who are falling through the cracks.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. One thing the article discusses at length is the value of explicit teaching. That’s something we know quite a bit about at Seeds of Knowledge, so let’s break down what that means for your child.

The Importance of Explicit Instruction for Core Skills

What are Core Skills?

Core skills are the fundamentals that underpin all learning. Miss one, and it can be hard for others to stick.

For maths, these skills include basic number recognition, how to place numbers to represent orders of magnitude correctly, and where each numeral sits in relation to one another. Those skills underpin addition, subtraction and basic multiplication and division. It also includes telling time, navigating fractions, and money skills like recognising currency.

For literacy, children learn how to sound out words and how to spot high-frequency ones. It’s teaching how to read a sentence, and how to write their own. Literacy basics build on one another, so a child who can comfortably sound out a word is more likely to be able to work out correct spelling, and a child who knows how sentences are constructed will read more fluently too.

The Value of Core Skills

Strong core skills provide children with a confident footing in their learning. Miss those skills, and a student will struggle.

A child who struggles with basic maths is not going to have a fun time with the more complex material in upper primary, and a child who can’t read has a whole host of obvious problems interacting with the curriculum. They aren’t going to be able to read a task from a board or a worksheet, let alone complete it.

These struggles carry on to adult life. I don’t need to underline the problems an adult will have if they can’t manage money, or read documents in the workplace. Some children go on to struggle with street signs, instruction manuals and even the fractions found in recipes.

What is Explicit Instruction?

Explicit instruction is a way of teaching that relies on someone explaining, in detail, exactly what a child is learning, step by step. It breaks down big concepts into smaller, easily understood parts that are taught one by one, with the teacher modelling how the concept is applied. Each small component is outlined comprehensively before the teacher moves on to demonstrate the whole.

At Seeds of Knowledge, we use a modelling system known as ‘gradual release of responsibility’. The tutor starts by explaining the lesson, and then showing how they solve the problem. Then, the tutor and student work on an example together. Finally, the student is given a similar problem to work on by themselves.

By showing first, then guiding, the tutor ensures the student has a firm grasp of the concepts before giving them space to explore them on their own. They provide the fundamentals and give a framework for understanding.

It also allows the tutor to monitor a student’s progress. They see, every step of the way, where a child excels and what areas need more instruction. There’s never a chance for a child to lose their way – they’re guided right up to the moment the tutor knows, with certainty, that they can work comfortably on their own.

What About Inquiry-Led Learning?

Inquiry-led Learning is the model that is often positioned opposite to Explicit Instruction. Rather than being instructed directly by a teacher, students are presented with opportunities and problems that are designed to prompt questioning, exploration, and problem-solving. They may be guided through tasks, and given examples, but the onus is on the child to work out what’s going on.

Inquiry-led Learning absolutely has its place in contemporary education. It’s especially useful in STEM – budding scientists love to ask questions, after all, and the focus on problem-solving and experimentation in inquiry led learning is ideal for exploring the world around us.

But for fundamentals, too much relies on a child’s interest in the subject, and their ability to ask the right questions. It also assumes a certain degree of prior knowledge. Students need to have a framework that allows them to work through their task, and an understanding of the principles behind it in order to ask meaningful questions. For our youngest learners, many start school without those frameworks and prior knowledge. In an inquiry-based system, they are left adrift.

It’s especially problematic for children who struggle with formal learning as a whole. There is less oversight in an inquiry-based system, and students with gaps in their understanding are often missed entirely.

The Best of All Worlds

Here at Seed of Knowledge, we’re big believers in explicit instructions. We’ve seen too many smart little learners who come to us with big gaps in their core kills. They’re sharp, observant and switched on, but have simply fallen through those cracks Duffy highlights so well in his article. They deserve better than that.

Our tutors always explain key concepts explicitly and in detail. They model how to work through problems, and make sure each child has the basics they’re ever dropped in front of a tricky task. They still have plenty of chance to explore and ask questions through hands-on tasks and physical examples, but we give them the tools they need to approach them confidently first.

If you’d like to see what benefits the Seeds of Knowledge approach can offer your child, get in touch for an assessment today.

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