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Key points
- Memorizing is often the most challenging and least liked work required for school success.
- Parents can make learning more interesting by connecting school topics to their child's life and interests.
- Asking questions and listening attentively can make learning more fun and relevant.
It’s a challenge to help children feel positive about school when frustration, boredom, over-testing, reduced elective time, and more intense curriculum demands block them from the joy they should experience from learning. You want them to keep alive the love of learning they had when they started kindergarten.
You can do this by connecting their classroom studies to their interests and their lives outside of the classroom. When you use strategies to reverse school negativity, you will promote children’s more positive responses to school.
Link school topics to their past, present, and future
Practice of what is learned, like exercising a muscle, is needed to build strong memories. The neuronal circuits holding memory become stronger each time the information is reviewed or applied.
The brain achieves this through a process of neuroplasticity. You help your kids expand and strengthen memory networks by activating and linking them to the school subject. An example would be triggering the memory (reminding them) of your family camping trip as they study about the settlers traveling across the country in covered wagons.
Further, connect their brains to the topics they are studying at school by reviewing photos or objects your family owns that were made in countries they study. You can also retell one of their favorite stories that can be related to their topic in science, history, and math. Build their curiosity and interest by asking them questions they can consider and then respond to their answers by connecting these stories, past experiences, possessions, or interests to the current school topic. The child’s curiosity, prompted by your reminders of their past experiences and current interests, is a memory brain bridge ready to link with the information they must learn for school.
Ask questions
You can promote your children’s curiosity and questions while looking out the car window and analyzing the billboards or walking in the park and thinking about how a better lawn sprinkler could be designed that wouldn’t waste water by wetting the sidewalk.
At home, in the park, or in a museum, they can have the opportunity to really think about the new knowledge as they personalize it and discuss their ah-ha’s with you.
You might want to have a handy note card with a supply of open-ended questions that are good bridges to link your children’s interests to a variety of school topics. For example, if your child is interested in sports, a question on your list could be, “If you were the coach of a ____ team, how would you use ____ to help your team win? The first blank would be their favorite sport or the name of a favorite team. The second blank would be the related school topic (gravity, averaging, multiplying, relevant vocabulary words, inventions, or qualities evident in characters from their school literature books).
Practice attentive listening
The discussions you promote to bridge your children’s lives and interests to their schoolwork will serve as adhesive memory cement, especially if you are an active, attentive listener when they express their ideas. This is not the time to split your focus. To keep their attention, your children need to know you are truly interested in their ideas and opinions.
If they learned about taxation without representation in American history or percentages in math, you can show them the grocery bill and ask their opinion of the tax added to the total. How was the number calculated? Can they estimate what percent of the total bill the tax represents? Is it fair to have tax?
If they like skateboarding and the city council voted down the proposed skateboard park, you have the opening for a discussion of democracy or city government. Do they think the decision was fair? How does the current system work? How do the council members represent what you want? Should children vote? Should people who pay more taxes have more say in how tax money is spent? All these questions can be linked to topics in history, such as the Revolutionary War (taxation without representation), the Civil War, poll taxes, and voting rights for former slaves and women—which came first and why?
There are significant rewards when you prepare your children’s brains to connect with school subjects. Their increased, attentive interest in the information they must learn becomes authentic because you helped them develop the motivation to connect to that learning through personal interest. The results of your planning and preparations will do more than make your children connect more positively with school. Smiles will replace groans and eye rolls as you learn with and from your children.
