Six ways to help your child love learning

How to make the learning process more joyful and positive for children? To find the answer, it is necessary to formulate the question a little differently: how to help children get joy and positive emotions from learning? Let's face it: many children today do not like to learn. Why is this happening. Six ways to help your child love learning.

Why don't children like school?

Every teacher knows that there are many reasons why children may or may not like school. For example, some children like to go to school because they have many friends in the classroom, while others do not like it because school bullies make fun of them. However, from the point of view of cognitive psychology, an important factor in learning satisfaction is whether the child has a constant opportunity to perform tasks at school and whether he is passionate about this process. How can teachers provide this for a child?

Make sure you set children feasible tasks

The task in this case does not only mean mathematical problems or questions that you ask the class. We mean any cognitive work related to finding the answer to a problematic question. This can be an analysis of a poem or writing a work on any topic.

Of course, the whole learning process is based on cognitive work, because every teacher wants his students to learn to think. But if you do not choose the material carefully, the lesson can turn into a continuous explanation of the teacher. Students in this case do not have the opportunity to perform tasks.

Review lesson plans, pay attention to devoting enough time to the cognitive work of students. How often do students complete tasks? Do the tasks alternate with explanations? Do you anticipate situations where students do not understand the task or are just trying to guess the correct answer? Pay attention to all this when planning lessons.

Accept the fact that students' cognitive abilities are limited

When planning tasks for students, remember that their cognitive capabilities are not limitless. For example, if you tell children about a historical event (which they have probably heard about) and ask them questions, make sure they have a basic knowledge of the subject. Otherwise, children will find this topic boring. If they lack basic knowledge, articalpone the study of this topic to a later time.

It is equally important to understand that children's memory is also limited. The child may have a limited amount of information in memory. Memory can be overloaded through complex instructions, a large number of unrelated facts, long logical chains, or the application of newly learned complex concepts to new material.

If you understand what is overloading students' memory, fixing this problem is easy. Explain the material in slow motion and use auxiliary tools, such as writing some of the material on the board.

Explain the tasks you set for the students

How to make learning tasks interesting for children? The most common way is to make them relevant. This is indeed justified, but not all the material in the school curriculum can be made relevant to students. Imagine that some children in the class like to play football, others collect cards with superheroes, others play the piano, others are passionate about dancing ... It is very difficult to choose material that will be relevant to everyone. If you mention the name of a popular singer in class, it will cause a momentary revival in the classroom, but no more. True interest in the material arises when we see a task that we believe we can accomplish.

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But what should be the questions for children to want answers? Teachers are accustomed to viewing the school curriculum as a set of knowledge in various fields. They want students to know the laws of physics, the dates and causes of historical events, and so on. Sometimes it seems that teachers are so eager to get answers that they do not spend enough time explaining the questions. However, from the point of view of cognitive psychology, the questions themselves can arouse interest in learning. Ready-made answers are of no use.

When planning a lesson, teachers usually start with the knowledge that their students need to learn by the end of the lesson. Then think about what the key question to this topic might be. How to formulate this question so that it is not very difficult for students and arouse their interest?

When should students be confused?

Teachers often try to engage students with questions, demonstrations, or unusual facts. In each of these cases, the teacher aims to confuse the students and thus arouse their interest. This, of course, is beneficial. But this technique can be used not only at the beginning of the lesson, but also after you have considered the basic concepts.

For example, teachers often demonstrate the following experiment in the lower grades: they put a burning sheet of paper in a wide-necked bottle and a boiled egg on top of the neck of the bottle. As the paper burns, the egg will pull inside the bottle. If students do not know the physical laws that underlie this experiment, they will be surprised. But such a surprise will be short-lived and will not arouse their interest in the laws of physics.

The teacher can also conduct this experiment after explaining that warm air expands and cold air compresses, thus creating a vacuum.

If the demonstration confuses the child before he or she receives an explanation, he or she will enjoy the task throughout the lesson. Therefore, the lesson should start with the experiment.

Change the pace of the lesson

Students' attention is distracted throughout the lesson. This also happens when the teacher confuses the children with an experiment or an unexpected fact. But the good news is that children's attention can be turned back. Children are attracted to any changes in the classroom. Example, if there is any noise outside the window, all students will turn to the window.

Record your achievements

Solving problems gives students the pleasure of learning. In this case, the task should be simple enough to be within the reach of students and complex enough for them to make some mental effort to find the answer. Finding such a golden mean is not easy. The best helper in this case is experience: keep applying what works and get rid of everything that does not work. However, you can hardly remember how well this or that technique worked in class, a year later. Therefore it is better to write down the successful pedagogical receptions. It doesn't matter in what form to make records; the main thing is to make it a habit.