How to Encourage Your Child to Love Learning

How to Encourage Your Child to Love Learning

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Ultimately, we want our kids to love to learn. A passion for learning is quite different from just studying to earn a grade or to please parents or teachers. Those who develop a love of learning at an early age continue the process throughout their lives and are generally more successful, interesting, and happier than those who don't.

Steps

1. Talk with your child about the things you read and hear, especially the things you find interesting.
   


2. Ask your kids how they feel about various issues (current events, relationships, values). Allow them to have opinions without passing judgment. Ask your children to help you understand why they feel the way they do.
   


3. Pursue your own hobbies and interests. Share these with your child, but do not require that he or she follow your pursuits.
   


4. Encourage your kids to have interests of their own. If they show curiosity about a hobby, area of study, sport, or instrument, encourage and support them in any way your finances allow.
   


5. Read books. Read on your own, which sets a good example. Read to your kids, to get them hooked on books.
   


6. Expose your child to a wide variety of experiences including music, plays, sports, museums, travel, reading, dance, games, food, puzzles, ethnic activities, etc. One never knows how what exposure may influence future life choices.
   


7. Play "thinking games" with your kids. These are games where there is not just one answer. Scrabble and chess are examples. Emphasize the value of thoughtful moves rather than the importance of winning.
   


8. Remember that you are your child's best teacher. School, educational games and television, and a shelf full of books all can't accomplish what you can in the education of your child. It doesn't take much effort to inspire a child's brain in the everyday world - the place where they need it the most. Here are a few simple things you can do to engage your child: count the number of houses, black cars, bicycles, etc. that you pass as you drive; search for letters, numbers, or colors on the restaurant menu; when you are going to use a gum-ball machine, hold out a handful of coins and explain the differences, and that the machine will only take the quarter (then let your child pick out a quarter and put it in the machine - they love this!).
   


9. Provide your child with free time. Children need plenty of free time to discover and explore. Don't jam pack your schedule with errands and activities. Give your child time for free play, day dreaming and roaming around in the back yard.
   


10. Start sooner, rather than later. Fostering independence in your child is very important for their brain development and how they feel about learning. Sometimes, activities seem too difficult for your child only because you haven't encouraged them to do it yet. For example, things like peeling their own banana, picking out which shirt to wear, and feeding the family cat, are all things that a young toddler can do. Letting your child do things like this makes them feel more in control of their world, which in turn inspires them toward bigger and better exploits. When the world is in your hands, you want to do something with it, don't you?
    


11. Let them know that school is important by being supportive of the school. Attend school functions, volunteer in the classroom if possible, and communicate with the teacher. Ask the teacher what you can do to help your child.

Tips

• If you demonstrate excitement about learning and are open to your children pursuing their own interest areas, it will be hard for them to resist the opportunities.
  


• Explain to your child why he or she is learning, and how it will be worthwhile (e.g. learning multiplication tables)
  


• Leave interesting books and materials lying around for your child to explore.
  


• Keep it fun....not stressful.

Warnings

• Try not to go overboard about grades. If your child makes a low grade, don't scream and yell, but instead show them what they did wrong and help them understand. For good grades, don't buy big, expensive things to celebrate (at least not all the time). Your child will feel pressured/persuaded to do well and will dread low grades. Giving too many rewards also encourages bad habits and manners, such as bragging, and can lead to complexes (such as fear of failure). Understand that not all children will get A's and B's and that C's are OKAY and considered good, as C's are average.

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• How to Be Patient When Doing Homework With Your Young Child
  


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• How to Teach Manners to a Toddler
  


• How to Overcome Your Child's Learning Difficulties
  


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• How to Be a Good Stepfather
  

Sources and Citations

• From Homework Battles To Happiness

Article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Encourage Your Child to Love Learning. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

How to Be Self Learning

from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

These days, if you want to learn something, get a teacher. But you have to pay a cost and these costs are expensive. To be self learning is just great!!!

Steps

1. In order to be motivated, make sure you really want to learn something. If you do not want to learn for learning's sake, become clear about the reason why you want to learn something and try to imagine how it is, when your learning was successful. Maybe you'll find out, that you don't want to learn that thing, so at least you can save some time. If you don't really want to learn it, the time spent on trying to learn it will be mostly wasted.
   
2. Take a look at the information you have at the moment: does it provide you enough stuff to learn? If so, start learning, else gather at least as much information as you need to begin learning. Some people may like it more if they have all the information they want to learn, but it is also possible, that you become discouraged by too much information, so find out how you feel most comfortable.
   
3. As said above, start learning. If possible, do experimental stuff first, because it helps you to get into the topic. Physicists for example often try to explain why something works like they've seen in the experiment, so it would be good if you can do the experiment on your own, make a thought-experiment or get a video of that experiment. Although in some fields like mathematics concrete examples may lead off-road, in most cases it will help you to understand what's that stuff all about. It's not beneficial to learn some formulae, statistics or dates if you can not imagine what they describe.
   
4. If there is anything you can practice, maybe if you try to learn dancing some steps or in school exercises just do them. Albeit it may be tempting to rush through them, for somebody inexperienced it is better to do the exercises in a moderate pace and careful. This prevents sloppy technique or bad habits, which are much harder to correct than small mistakes at the beginning.
   
5. Get more experienced people to judge you. Beside they can correct your mistakes, they - maybe even more important - can tell you when you are already doing something well, which can be very motivating.
   
6. Gather knowledge. One of the most common mistakes is that people concentrate either on the practical or on the theoretical aspects of something. This only leads to stereotypes like the stupid sportsman or the nonathletic nerd. However, it is also very ineffective, because you probably don't use your whole brain, but only the left side or the motoric part. Having an open mind also helps to see connections to things you already like, thus increasing comprehension and motivation.
   
7. Throw time at it. The best learning strategy doesn't help, if you don't spend a decent amount of time in it. According to the topic it even may be enough just to spend everyday half an hour on some exercises or texts. Special learning techniques can make learning easier, but they still require work done by you.
   
8. Organize your learning. At the end of a session look what you accomplished and prepare the next session with some questions or tasks, so the next time you only need to start working on the topic, which decreases the risk of procrastination.
   

Article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Be Self Learning. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

How to Resolve Classroom Management Issues

How to Resolve Classroom Management Issues
from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

Unlike a teacher training focus of many universities, few teachers find their day devoted to content. Many teachers find much of their time devoted to classroom management.
As times change, the type of student in any given classroom changes. More teachers report needing help with students who are non-compliant and verbally abusive to both peers and adults. Your training may not have given you the prevention and intervention tools you need to stop the extreme misbehavior that you may be coping with on a daily basis. Here are a few of the most important elements to help you in putting an end to your classroom management nightmare.

Steps

1. • Stop using one-size-fits-all methods and start using specific, and individualized methods. Just like adults, students can be complex. The same intervention may play out very differently from one student to the next. It is absolutely critical that you have a wide variety of methods to draw upon to manage each situation. It's not about which methods you personally want to use, it's about the best method for each student. Example strategy:Not every student understands how to be quiet in class, and much less motivated to do so. Don't just state the rules or expectations, help students establish a habit of meeting expectations. Teach your students that "when the hand goes up, the mouth goes shut". Apply a tailored "intervention" that involves the class as a whole. This will often work well with non-compliant, distracted, ADHD, and defiant students because it is so much fun — especially for the student who gets to lead the intervention.
     
   • Teach school skills and focus on motivation. Giving rules to students who lack the skills and motivation to comply is ineffective. Contemporary children must be taught the nuts-and-bolts of the target behaviors. They also need to be convinced that education matters. Otherwise, rules and consequences will fail to elicit the desired behaviors from students who have no inclination to comply.
     
   • Avoid outdated techniques. Use methods that fit contemporary students and contemporary problems. Years ago, you might have had a small number of unmanageable students. Now, it is common to expect as much as 14% of mainstream students to be classroom management nightmares. Don't use old-style methods to manage today's severely unmanageable students. Learn about conduct disorders, and your most misbehaved, contemporary student.
     
   • Interact with the parents. If you find your daily resources drained on primarily a few students with behavioral problems, consult their parents. You don't need to put off meeting their parents until parent/teacher conference day. Contact them as soon as possible and arrange for a convenient time to discuss their child's behavior and/or needs. Be polite, be respectful, but be direct with the parents. Ask for their guidance and request ideas to address their child's behavior problems. If the child's parents are willing to help or at least cooperate, the experience may liberate a drain on your resources.
     
   
   

Tips

• Never issue a threat you cannot or will not carry out.
  
• Be scrupulously fair and consistent in your response.
  
• Never lose your temper. You are the adult and you must behave accordingly at all times.
  
• Don't fire your big guns until the last moment. Have a set of responses which build up in their severity. Try to resolve the behaviour yourself first and only bring in your line manager when your sanctions have failed.
  

Related wikiHows

• How to Survive an Internship in Elementary Education
  
• How to Collaborate in Lesson Planning
  
• How to Use wikiHow in the Classroom
  
• How to Use Web Resources for Teaching
  

Sources and Citations

• Youth Change resource site Article originally excerpted with permission. Link required for article reprint permission per owner copyright.
  

Article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Resolve Classroom Management Issues. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Education News-2: "Class Room Libraries"

The Tamilnadu Government has instructed schools to establish "CLASS ROOM LIBRARIES" in every class, to inculcate general reading habit among students. Each library will have a minimum of 50 books. This will also help students to improve their general knowledge and to start literary circles among themselves, where they can discuss the books they have read. This laudable measure deserves appreciation.