Our Mission
Our mission is simple: encourage every child to make their mark!
We provide exciting preschool classes where your child learns how to mark make through play. If it’s fun and it’s messy – it can’t be learning…can it?? Wrong! Babies and young children learn best through play.
Mark making is the first step towards writing!
Mark making is a huge part of your child’s learning journey and one of the outcomes of a prime area of learning – Physical Development – in Early Years Foundation Stage Guidance (birth to 60 months).
When your child starts to make scribbles, patterns and shapes, this is ‘mark making’. It is the first step towards writing. Your child explores, experiments and expresses themselves through the marks they make. They begin to assign meaning to their marks, which leads to creativity and exploration.
Exploring different textures, materials and grabbing various apparatus will help your child get ready for writing. Encouraging your child to use their hands, fingers, feet and toes to make marks will strengthen their core muscles and develop their gross and fine motor skills. These skills are vital for holding and controlling a pencil and letter and number formation.
Children can mark make in many different ways: pen and paper, painting, ‘messy play’ or even drawing in the sand on the beach. All of these provide opportunities to explore a wide range of tools too such as paintbrushes, chalks, pencils and their bodies. The benefits of mark making are clear. Your child’s fine motor skills will develop and strengthen in preparation for writing.
The Mark Making Programme
During Little Learners classes we follow a unique early writing program for under 5’s devised by a qualified early years teacher. The programme is easy to follow and can be differentiated within the age range of 5 month to 5 years. Every child booked on to a term of Little Learners classes receives an electronic copy of our programme for free or can purchase a hard copy.
It is our view at Little Learners that the more that children have fun mark making and developing their motor skills, the more prepared and confident they will be when it comes to writing at school. In our mark making programme, our four Mark Maker characters represent the four main marks that help to make up all letters, numbers, shapes and patterns: a straight line, curve, circle and a zig-zag.
Repetition is important in mark making and the more the mark is practiced, the more recognisable the mark will become to the child. The mark making opportunities are appropriate for every type of learner. The way we learn best can be auditory, visual, or kinaesthetic. Little Learners classes provide resources that are colourful, engaging and eye-catching with a good selection of different textures and surfaces which are interesting for children to touch. For example, to assist the auditory learner we make sure there is music playing – mark making to the beat!
We focus on the main ‘marks’ that make up all letters, numbers, shapes & patterns. If a child can make each of the 4 marks represented by our characters, then they will be able to form the letter, number, shape or pattern.
Meet the Mark Makers!
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