How Children Learn

The first learning experience of a child is through tactile awareness. In addition to this "hands-on" knowledge, recognition includes smelling, hearing, and tasting in a rich contact with the environment. These senses are quickly augmented and superseded by the iconic- the ability to see, to recognise and understand environmental and emotional forces visually. From nearly our first experience of the world, we organise our needs and pleasures, preferences and fears, with great dependence on what we see. Or what we want to see. But this description is only the tip of the iceberg and in no way measures the power and importance the visual sense exerts on our lives. We accept it without realising that it can be improved just in the basic process of observation or extended into an incomparable tool of human communication. We accept seeing as we experience it- effortlessly.

When designing my learning cards I need to ensure that the product is easy to use and child-friendly. It must be informative but also must not bombard the child with too much to take in. As Caleb Gattegno comments on the nature of the visual sense in his book, Towards a Visual Culture:

"Sight, even though used by all of us naturally, has not yet produced its civilisation. Sight is swift, comprehensive, simultaneously, analytic and synthetic. It requires so little energy to function, as it does, at the speed of light, that it permits our minds to receive and hold an infinite number of items of information in a fraction of a second."

When we see, we do so many things; we experience what is happening in a direct way; we discover something we never noticed or possibly never even looked for before; we become aware through a series of visual experiences of something we eventually come to recognise and know; we watch for evolving changes through patient observation.