Discovering the Key to a Child’s Learning: Insights from Rūta Kareckaitė-Gouriou, a Learning and Sensory Integration Specialist

Written by Giedrė Gudaitė

Published in Lithuanian on 14 October, 2026, the original text is here.

On 26 September, a practical workshop entitled Discovering the Key to a Child’s Learning was held at the Lithuanian Mother Tongue School “Three Colours” in Reykjavik, Iceland. Led by Rūta Kareckaitė-Gouriou, a learning and sensory integration specialist, the workshop brought together members of the school community to explore questions about children’s attention, learning, multilingualism, motivation, and emotional self-regulation. The discussion went beyond learning difficulties, inviting participants to consider how a child’s development, nervous system, body, emotions, and environment shape the learning process.

How Development Shapes Learning

At the beginning of the workshop, Rūta introduced a pyramid illustrating human development, behaviour, and learning processes. The model arranged these processes from deeper, earlier influences—such as epigenetic and transgenerational factors, the central nervous system, and sensory systems—to higher-level functions, including cognitive, academic, and executive functions.

This model offered a different way of looking at children’s difficulties. What appears in a child’s behaviour as a difficulty with higher-level functions—for example, trouble concentrating, controlling impulses, or getting started on a task—is not necessarily a problem at that level alone. Sometimes, the underlying causes may lie in deeper layers of development.

Rūta also spoke about brain development, reminding us that different brain functions develop at different stages of childhood. It therefore makes little sense to expect a child to perform certain tasks before they are physiologically ready to do so.

Rūta used reading as an example. According to her, the brain processes required for independent reading are not yet sufficiently mature in very young children. Teaching a child to read early does not necessarily mean that the child is already ready to read independently.

Effective reading involves several interconnected stages: recognising letters, identifying their sequence, recognising that sequence as a word, and connecting the word with its meaning and mental image. Rūta explained that the efficiency of these processes depends on the corpus callosum, a bundle of white-matter nerve fibres connecting the brain’s two hemispheres. She noted that this structure is not yet sufficiently developed in very young children. As a result, teaching a very young child to read may teach them to decode a word without necessarily enabling them to connect its visual form with its linguistic meaning and sense.

When parents and teachers wonder why a child cannot or does not know how to perform a particular task, they might therefore begin by asking: “Is the child’s brain ready to do this?” Only once the answer is yes is it worth looking for other possible causes of the difficulty.

First, Help the Child Calm Down

An important topic was self-regulation in children and the role adults play in supporting it. Rūta introduced the red- and green-zone model, which she uses in her practice and which is described in Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish’s book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.

In the red zone—a state in which a person feels threatened—processes associated with survival and emotional responses take over more of the brain’s activity. Rational thinking and problem-solving consequently become much more difficult. In the green zone, a calm and safe state in which the brain no longer interprets the environment as threatening, the brain regions responsible for higher cognitive functions can operate more effectively. Thinking, learning, making decisions, and regulating one’s behaviour become easier.

This is particularly important when children experience intense emotional reactions, such as what are commonly called tantrums, or moments of strong frustration or resistance. When a child is in the red zone, an adult’s attempt to explain, persuade, or teach appropriate behaviour is not necessarily the best first step. The priority is to help the child return to a calmer state. What helps will depend on the child: one may need a hug, while another may need the opportunity to retreat to a quieter place and spend some time alone. Only then is it possible to talk about what happened, look for solutions, and learn from the experience.

Rūta also emphasised the importance of creating a safe environment in which children can experience their emotions: an environment where they can express and recognise their feelings and experience them without having to suppress them. According to Rūta, being able to move safely through the full cycle of an emotion and experience acceptance of one’s feelings is an important part of emotional development and resilience.

Supporting Children’s Multilingual Development

Speaking about how children learn languages, Rūta pointed out that children learn first by observing and imitating the people around them, rather than by studying textbooks. As they acquire both their first language and additional languages, children observe and absorb what adults say and how they say it.

This highlights the importance of dialogue and of having opportunities to observe it. By watching other people communicate with one another, rather than only participating in conversations themselves, children learn the reciprocal nature of communication in the target language: both how to ask questions and how to respond. It is therefore important for children to see their parents or other adults communicating, in person or remotely, with relatives and other people close to them, as well as with members of the wider community.

It is also important to recognise that children absorb not only language itself from their parents and surroundings, but also their parents’ attitudes towards languages. Which languages do parents value, and how do they value them? Which languages do they speak themselves? How do they respond to the language spoken by the wider society in the country where they live? According to Rūta, children observe and unconsciously absorb all of this.

Parents’ attitudes towards the language of the society in which they live can influence their children’s relationship with that language and their willingness to learn it. In a multilingual environment, it is therefore important for parents to demonstrate an open and curious attitude towards all the languages their family members and children encounter.

This does not mean, however, that a family needs to give up its mother tongue and begin speaking the language of the wider society at home.

Rūta’s position on this question was clear: the language of family life and close relationships should be the family’s mother tongue. The language of the wider society can be learned together in other ways—by reading books, watching films or cartoons, attending public events, or working on homework.

It is also very important for children to interact with their peers, from whom they can learn languages through play and extracurricular activities. Mother tongue schools abroad provide an excellent environment for this kind of interaction, allowing children to use and develop their mother tongue. To support children in learning the language of the wider society, younger children can be taken to indoor play centres or playgrounds, while older children can join clubs and activities where they have opportunities to interact with other children.

Different Ways of Learning

Different abilities and ways of learning and absorbing information were also discussed during the workshop. Rūta introduced Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences and presented eight categories: verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, musical, bodily-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.

According to this theory, people do not have just one type of intelligence. Different intelligences can be expressed to varying degrees and can work together. Their relative strengths are not necessarily fixed, either: Gardner emphasises that a person’s intelligence profile can change as they mature and gain new experiences.

This perspective invites us to look at children’s learning not only in terms of what they find difficult, but also in terms of what they do well. If a child struggles to learn in one way, it is worth looking for another. Perhaps something that is difficult to explain in words can be demonstrated visually. Something that is hard to remember by reading can be sung or connected with movement and rhythm. Something that seems too abstract can be turned into a concrete experience.

The important thing, then, is not to rush to assign a child a single “learning type”, but to observe what engages them, where their strengths emerge, and which approaches help them understand and absorb information most effectively.

The Role of the Body in Learning

One of the topics explored in greatest depth was learning through action and the senses.

Rūta offered a practical example of learning about units of measurement. A child can read in a textbook that one metre equals one hundred centimetres and memorise this fact, but it is difficult to understand what a metre actually looks like in real space from a book alone. A very different experience is to take a measuring tape and measure a metre oneself. The same applies to other abstract quantities.

When a child not only hears a concept but also sees, touches, measures, or experiments with the objects or phenomena associated with it, learning becomes a multisensory experience. Different sensory systems are engaged, and the brain can connect information from different sources. This creates more associations that may later help the child retrieve and remember the information.

It is therefore worth looking for opportunities to demonstrate, touch, or try things out, or to connect information with movement, rhythm, and voice. This is important in language learning, too: a new word can be associated not only with its meaning but also with an image, an action, a sound, or a concrete experience. Rhythm and singing can be particularly helpful for memorising new information, while visual materials can effectively complement verbal instruction.

How Movement Supports Attention

When considering attention, it is worth rethinking the role of movement in children’s ability to concentrate.

At first glance, it may seem that a child who is concentrating should sit still. Yet keeping the body in one position also requires continuous effort, involving numerous small muscle movements and ongoing control. Children’s brains are not always physiologically ready for sitting still for prolonged periods, which can itself be a surprisingly demanding task.

Movement should therefore not automatically be seen as the opposite of concentration. Certain activities involving movement, balance, rhythm, and proprioception—the sense of the body’s position and movement—may help children regulate their bodies and prepare to concentrate.

During the workshop, Rūta introduced various practical tools and activities that may support attention and self-regulation, including balance and movement exercises, rhythmic activities, sensory tools, and visual tracking exercises.

Learning does not take place separately from the body: the body is part of the learning process.

Supporting Children’s Motivation to Learn

Children’s motivation is influenced by several factors. Four particularly important elements are having choices, autonomy, a sense of competence, and a sense of meaning. All of these help sustain motivation.

It is not enough simply to tell a child what they need to do. It is important that they feel they have some choice, can do as much as possible independently, feel capable of completing the task, and understand why it matters to them.

Finding meaning in learning one’s mother tongue while living abroad is a question many families face. At the Lithuanian Mother Tongue School “Three Colours”, pupils explored this question with Rūta by discussing what mattered to them in life and how the Lithuanian language was connected to their interests, relationships, and other important areas of their lives.

After a lengthy discussion, they discovered that Lithuanian was present in many aspects of their lives, often in ways they had not previously considered. This helped them see for themselves why learning their mother tongue was meaningful to them.

Sometimes, then, the purpose of an activity is not immediately apparent or easy to explain. Discovering it may require more time, conversations, reflection, and a safe, open dialogue with a teacher or another adult.

From Problems to Needs

Perhaps the most important message of the workshop was an invitation to look at children’s learning not in isolation and not only through the lens of problems, but in the context of their overall development and individual needs. A child’s ability to learn is influenced by a range of interconnected factors, including their developmental stage, emotional state, sensory experiences, language, relationships with their environment, ways of learning, motivation, and previous experiences.

Instead of asking a problem-focused question such as “Why can’t my child concentrate?”, it is worth turning to questions that help us get to know and understand the child better:

Is the task appropriate for the child’s developmental stage and abilities?
Does the child feel safe?
Do they understand what they are supposed to do?
Can they see the purpose of the task?
Are they able to learn in a way that works for them?
Do they have enough opportunities for movement and sensory experiences?
Does the teaching approach help bring out their strengths?

Rūta emphasises that the key to supporting a child’s learning is first to seek to understand the child and get to know their needs.