How to Encourage Your Child to Love Learning
Most people want their children to love learning and reading. They want their child to be better educated but do you know how to encourage that love of learning? Here are 5 steps on How to Encourage Your Child to Love Learning:
Talk To Your Children
Firstly, remember to talk with your child about every day life. You can talk to them about the things you read and hear and about the things that you find interesting. Ask them what do they think about a certain issue. By asking them to express their opinions and thoughts, you are actually teaching them to articulate their thoughts properly. Research has shown that children who do this have larger vocabularies and are better readers.
Be a Good Role Model
Secondly, you have to be a good role model. You need to set a good example for your children. You can’t expect them to love reading, if you yourself don’t like reading. So you could start when they are young, read to them before they go to sleep at night. As they get older, you could establish a reading hour before they sleep. Furthermore you could also organise weekly trips to the library. Introduce to them the books of your childhood from your favourite authors.
Have Game Nights
Thirdly, you could introduce thinking games to your children too. How about setting a game night in your family? Set a day where the whole family gets together and play games. Teach them games that require thinking like chess or scrabble. Don’t place so much emphasis on winning but compliment them on moves that have been well thought out.
Encourage a Hobby
Fourthly, you could also inculcate a hobby in your children. If you are interested in a certain hobby like the study of insects or the study of music, you could show your child your hobby. If they show interest in your hobby, then that’s good news for you. However if they don’t, don’t force them to like your hobby. Instead encourage them to pursue hobbies of their own. If they seem interested in a musical instrument, you can encourage their hobby further by signing them up for music classes and supporting their interest.
Make Reading Interesting and Fun
Have a library of books available for your children to have access to. Allow them to choose whichever book they want to read. Let them develop a love of reading, because in doing so, they will learn to love learning. Read to your child, especially when they are very young. Let your child see the pictures as you read the book to him or her. Then teach your child to read out loud back to you. Create a reading time where you all read for 20 minutes a day.
Have lots and lots of different types of reading material lying around the home. And I don’t mean for you to simply allow your children to have access to a smart phone where they can read on the internet. Ditch the phone if you truly want your child to grow up smart and capable. The phone won’t teach your child how to survive if they have no electricity, for example. What it will do is get your child addicted to technology, which isn’t going to help them in the years to come.
As a Family, Go Out Into Nature
Go out into nature with your children and watch Nature. See a waterfall cascade down the side of a cliff, watch as a butterfly breaks loose from its cocoon. See the wild rabbits or the horses in the paddock. Watch how the wrens go flitting about the garden, or how a kookaburra sits in the old gumtree, laughing away at those he can see! Teach your kids to adore the world around them. Teach them how to start a fire without matchsticks. Teach them how to use a compass. Teach them how to plant vegetables and fruit trees and berries.
Make learning fun too! While out in Nature, splash a bit of water on each other and make it fun to be there. This will encourage your kids to learn the most important things of all – to love to be part of Nature, to learn to live beside Her, and to have respect for Her life sustaining force.
Lastly, remember that you are the very best example there is for your children. So if you want them to love learning, you got to start doing it yourself too. So change yourself today and start loving learning too!
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