Learning can start to get tedious when you are a child, especially if you are required to sit for long hours, staring at pages of text. Children often prefer to be active and play, making teaching them a challenging task.
However, learning does not have to be difficult if it is made enjoyable! Here are some tips and tricks to make learning more entertaining for children and hopefully have them craving for more.
Create simple experiments
As children tend to be more involved in hands-on activities, incorporating experiments into the teaching is one way to make learning more enjoyable. Experiments on YouTube channels like Mark Rober teach basic science without the bore of remembering definitions and formulas, providing inspiration for parents to draw on when deciding on what experiments to use.
Note down the hypothesis that your child has come up with before every experiment that you will conduct to further aid explaining, especially when they hypothesised wrongly!
Teach to your child’s ability
Understand your child’s learning capabilities to teach most efficiently. By understanding how your child processes information, it allows you to understand how you should teach your child and how fast to go. Keep in mind to be patient and use simple terms when explaining, so your child does not struggle to understand, which makes the process more difficult.
Take short breaks
Humans’ attention spans are short-lived, whether you are a child or an adult. Hence, plan out pockets of time for learning and slot in 5 to 10 minutes breaks in between to give you and your child time to rest and digest the lesson. After the break, both you and your child will return invigorated and more ready to delve back into the lesson plan.
Explore the outdoors
Learning can take place anywhere, from restaurants, beaches and even at playgrounds. Try to utilise everyday objects to explain a certain phenomenon your child is learning, from friction and gravity on the playground to practising addition and subtraction when calculating total costs during shopping runs.
Visit play and learn sites
In addition to the previous points, sites that allow both learning and play to occur are great ways to spice up the learning process. Places like the Science Centre Singapore and Kiztopia are great ways for your child to explore and have fun while picking up some knowledge that can be further supplemented by your explanations.
