How to improve children's learning skills
/ Blog
Parents and teachers play a crucial role in helping a child learn new information, skills and the right behaviour.
Children need to learn appropriate behaviour and social skills, therefore, equipping them with the right skills is an important role for educators.
This article discusses what you, as proactive teachers, can do to really make sure the kids learn. Also, find out how can educators promote learning in children and make this essential learning easier for the kids.
The power of visualisation: Help them see, not just hear
A bunch of words can often go in one ear, mingle for a minute in a noisy gathering of other words, and promptly head straight out the other ear. This is applicable to adults as well. As adults, we’re generally more attuned as to whether these are important words or just white noise; we’re better placed to either engage them or dismiss them.
Kids can’t do that. It’s all new, it’s all confusing. So stop and consider some of the important words or phrases you really want kids to grasp. It might be something like ‘Our class has lots of kids from different countries and they all matter the same.’
Ask the kids to picture that thought, and then ask them to draw it. The more kids learn to visualise what matters and try to convey it in pictures, the more they’ll embrace important concepts as life goes on.
How can educators acknowledge and support children's family and culture? Read in our previous blog post!
Effective communication: Help them teach, not just learn
Nothing focuses the mind on the dynamics of a task or technique more than having to tell someone else how to do it While we’re not suggesting your five year old teaches you how to manage your household budget, they can show you how to kick a rugby ball. Or swing a tennis racquet.
And while their coaching techniques might not match the pros, they are forced to analyse that kick or that swing in new ways. They are forced to see it in a new light and try to explain it, dissect it and relate it to you, so you can do it.
The opportunities to convert learning into teaching are endless and should not be underestimated as a powerful way to get kids thinking outside their incoming education square. Get them trying to teach you what they know and their learning will improvise.
Not only will they grasp what they know more fully, explaining it to someone else will quickly bring to light the flaws in their knowledge and see them eager to fill in the gaps.
Quality vs Quantity: Help them nibble, not just binge
A class is generally an hour and a teacher has a set number of hours to impart an often equally set curriculum over the course of a year. All well and good until that curriculum turns into hourly ticking of boxes crammed to overflow with information; information young kids, or even older kids, have difficulty in absorbing; well.
So what’s important in the grand scheme of things - a syllabus that symbolises what kids can actively embrace, comprehend and act on, or gluttony of information that leaves them ultimately unfulfilled?
Less is more, if less is assimilated in deeper, more practical ways. Educators can promote children’s learning by promoting classes of considered study, not just rooms in which to recite a big bunch of words.
If all that makes perfect sense to you, you can make a difference in the Australian education system.
