Five Steps to Foster a Love of Learning
Parents often hope for their child to be curious and motivated, to love knowledge and wake up excited to go to school each morning. A new school year is upon us, and with it, an inevitable resurfacing of parental anxiety about school work. Parents may ask, How to motivate my child? How to foster a desire to learn, and to make school synonymous with the joy of learning?…
It is not an impossible dream, dear parents and guardians. I hope these five steps will help you support your young school children in their growth to become passionate, enthusiastic learners, each one eager to get on the road to school each day.
1. Make learning fun
It’s no secret that children love to play. Whether they’re preparing for a spelling test or even reviewing multiplication tables, card games created with your children make learning fun. To strengthen vocabulary, try using gestures to act out words to help children understand them better. The web has so many great sites with ideas to make learning fun. This French website, Topla, offers creative activities for children age 3 to 10, including ones to help them better grasp basic math concepts, whether in counting, calculations and even geometry.
The French site ScealProd is a tool for learning how to tell stories. Children can write about a recent weekend activity or time away from home, and even add photos. Before your child types a single word, however, encourage them to write out their ideas on paper. While children are developing, the motion of writing by hand is one so important in Primary School. Each hand gesture supports the development of connections with letters and sounds which, in turn, supports proficiency in reading and writing, more than typing on a keyboard can. If your child is too young to write long sentences, they could simply write out a short caption for each photo. It’s the first step that counts.
2. Connect subjects with daily activites
Math is everywhere! You can have children calculate portions in a recipe, the cost of a Metrocard, or the time it takes to get to a friend’s home or the distance from home to school. These activities are both fun and concrete and will allow your child to understand basic math concepts effortlessly.
3. Let your child move
Some children need to move to learn. They’re kinesthetic learners, and they need to gesticulate! Don’t force a child to sit still. Instead, respect their need to move to learn a lesson. You might encourage them to skip rope to learn their times tables, for example. The repetitive rhythm of the jump rope supports learning of successive times tables.
4. Encourage collaborative activities with family and friends
Create moments for students of different ages to come together and help each other to learn a lesson or review homework. It’s a great way to develop a sense of teamwork with minimal pressure.
5. Listen and be supportive
Finally, and most importantly, be sure to understand your child’s emotional state when they’re doing school work. Learning and knowledge are harder when your child is not emotionally present. Caring education is rooted in emotional intelligence, good management of conflict and stress, and calm communication.
If you seek to help your child with homework, for example, pay attention to your child’s emotional well-being and limit the time you spend correcting their work, or the length of exercises if your child seems stressed. Think quality over quantity. Perhaps have a child memorize a simple line of poetry or do one math exercise well, rather than four with difficulty.
For children to be happy and become responsible, autonomous adults, they need structure and a sense of security from the youngest age, all the while giving breathing room to express their individuality.
I hope these small reminders will help you start the school year in serenity and that you’ll find less stress, health and happiness, curiosity and cooperation to benefit all, children and adults included!
About the Author :
Vannina Boussouf grew up on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, where bilingualism is an integral part of identity. She studied English and Spanish at the University of Corsica, and philology and letters in Cordoba, Spain, before starting a career as an elementary teacher and administrator. Vannina relocated to the United States in 2004, where she taught at the International School in Louisiana. She joined the Lycée in 2007 to direct the Primary School, and during her tenure, she has focused on innovative teaching methods that support the development of the whole child in a bilingual setting.