What children bring with them to the classroom matters just as much, if not more than what they are being taught at school. We live in a world where expectations are high. Good exam results are very important for many children, and you can give your children the edge to help them succeed.
The good news is that the potential that your child has can be developed easily, and success can come from some very simple everyday attitudes and examples. Don’t worry, you won’t need to start a night class in Algebra in order to help them. You can develop their learning attitude so they go to school every day ready to learn and able to improve their performance at school.
Nature can be nurtured. These common traits are already at your disposal, or with a small change in awareness, they can be easily put into reach.
Teach Your Child That Failure Is A Stepping-Stone To Success
Any skill needs a period of being not very good at in order to get better. In short, to be able to be good at something, you have to start out being bad.
Encouraging your child to increase their rate of failure, such as through lessons like ‘if at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again’, is the best way to increase their learning and develop their success in any area.
In order to do be able to do this, whether they’re struggling with the most important first grade math concepts or are finding more advanced Science tough, your children will have to have two key traits. They should have very little fear of failure or be resilient enough to push through when they do fail at first and come going until they do learn the skills they need.
There are some useful things that you can do at home to help your child develop these traits.
- Teach them chess. Chess is an ideal teaching tool, because of all the positive effects it can have on your child’s skills in login, problem-solving, and strategic planning. Chess takes discipline and concentration. These are very useful skills in the classroom too. A lot of board games are just built on luck and chance. Chess depends on the skill and patience of the player. Memory, maths, imagination, and creativity are all improved with a game of chess, plus it can be a fun way to spend some time with your children.
- Tell them about your own failures and how you overcame them. You know that success takes hard work and overcoming obstacles, but this might be obvious to your children yet. Take some time to explain your own experience of needing a learning curve, and this should help them to connect hard work with future rewards.
- Don’t overpraise. Teach your children in their early life that everybody has different talents and will be good at different things. Tell them not everyone will always get a trophy. Modern parents can fall into the trap of over-praising, which can lead to problems when children realize later on that they are not as brilliant as they have been told. Set positive, but realistic, expectations.
Make Learning An Activity That Your Child Loves
Learning will be a lot harder if your child sees it as a chore. A lot of us have a mental block about math at school, and a lot of this comes down to telling ourselves that we don’t like it.
Research psychologists have repeatedly proven that a good mood will make you more engaged, more creative, and more willing to stick with a tough task. If you can encourage your child to enjoy learning, they will find the rest a lot easier. Start out with a positive mindset, and success will come more easily.
Allow Your Child To Follow Teur Passion
In a world where many people have very specific specializations, it isn’t important or possible to be good at absolutely everything. It’s more important to be good at a few things. If your child shows an interest in something specific and gets a lot of joy from a certain topic at school, they will find it easier to excel at that topic.
Many parents worry about the things that their child is less good at and just let them quietly get on with the things that they are good at and enjoy. If they love English, don’t be afraid to encourage them and go over the top with the positive impact English has. Spending time with your child while they’re connecting with and enjoying a subject will also help you to understand how you can transfer some of that joy into a subject they don’t like as much.
Make Academic Subjects To Feel Relevant To Your Child
It can be hard for a child to focus on and enjoy a subject if they cannot see how it can have any relevance to their life or how it will help them in the future. Certain subjects can easily be dismissed by children as something that they only have to do in order to keep their teachers and parents happy, but they will never need again.
It’s not uncommon for parts of math to fall victim to this idea. You can help by bringing math home and using it as a family to show your children why it is useful. For example, you can use math to count out coins to pay for something in a shop, or to divide a cake into slices for everyone to enjoy. Your child’s Lego can also be a colorful and fun way to explore things like fractions. Everyday objects can be sorted with math.
When you travel, get your child to help you with reading the map (for geography), or ask them to help you translate items on the menu (languages). Do fun things with modeling clay and slime to create science in the real world. Teach them some basic biology next time they’ve fallen and bruised their knee.
Yell your children about how some subjects are useful for some jobs, such as explaining that your waitress is going to have to do mental arithmetic to bring you back your change. Show them real-world uses for subjects they see as pointless.
Involve Games In Learning As Much As Possible
If you can make learning into a game, children, who are hard-wired to want to play, will respond and learn a lot more quickly. An entire area of psychology has been dedicated to studying this. It’s known as gamification, and the term is used to describe turning something into a game in order to improve engagement.
You can use games to teach all kinds of things. For example, if you have been working on your child on their English skills, there will be days when they sit down feeling tired, fed up, and disconnected from learning. Instead of pushing them, which will only make them more frustrated, set aside the workbooks and do something fun. Games like Hangman or Scrabble are fun but still teach word skills, without your child even realizing it. Scrabble is a great way to increase literacy skills.
You don’t have to only play board games and parlor games. In recent years, there has been an explosion of competent games that are designed to help children with learning. There are lots of brain training games out there but stick to games designed for key skills for kids, such as math or English games.
