If There was a user manual to home-schooling... How do children learn?

Since the school have temporarily closed or by choice, you may have entered the teaching through home-schooling.

Even if you are used to supporting your children with their homework, home-schooling seems to bring in a new dimension to the home-schooling universe.

Your daily routine is perturbed, you have to craft a particular Covid-19 routine as well as suddenly becoming a teacher.

Teaching is a profession that has its own specificities and requires expertise. It's not given that you are made or not for the job. How to be sure you are doing the right thing at the right time. So many questions come to mind when looking as our little ones ans us with the teacher's cap on.

What I like to empathise is that as long as we do our best to make this experience as pleasant as possible for all parties involved, we are doing the right thing. While adding too much pressure on ourselves won't help.

Let's be honest. Teaching and educating has been part of you since you became a parent.

Just by being yourself and living your family life, your children learn buckets around you.

To help you in your new temporary role, I outline below 4 ways children are used to learn.

Take this as a starting point if you wish, you will find creative and concrete ways to teach.

By observing:

When children observe, it engages their mirror neurons.

Mirror neurons are brain cells that fire when we do an action and also when we simply watch someone else executing an action without moving a single muscle.

It plays a big part in how we learn skills through observing and also how we share skills and behaviours: pass knowledge down from generation to generation.

By imitating:

Children imitate to learn, improve and grow. This tendency is part of your child's natural process and refers to a tendency to conformism; It is what we are "supposed to do". Children copy what adults do and think it is right to do says Ben Kenward of the Department of Psychology at Uppsala in Sweden.

By repeating:

Repetition is the most effective way to learn, and it enables children to retain new information. Children also repeat because it gives the feeling that they master a situation, they enjoy their new capacities acquired and realise what they are capable of. Repetition is a way for children to enjoy their new skill - the joy of success evert time.

From a Montessori point of view, repetition leads to perfection.

E.g., Read and read again a story.

E.g., Put a puzzle together and start again.

It is also comforting to know what is going to happen, it also allows us to anticipate, to be ready. Repetition can be used to set up routines (e.g. bedtime).

By practising:

A child is a sensorial explorer who learns by using his senses, by experiencing, doing and practising.

To explain a task, show them how to do it. Instead of teaching logically, you'll definitely be as practical as possible.

E.g., to teach the concept of units in mathematics, you can use small transparent plastic bags, all the same size and some matches. The small bag represents a number, and the matches, you put inside the bag, represent the units. (1 bag for 1 number).

An example to teach fractions: bake a cake and cut it in half, 1/4,... or cut out circles in a pice of paper (1 for each portion).

These are only a few examples I have in stock to support you, so get in touch, and I'll share more peaceful and rewarding ways of home-schooling when you are not sed to it.

Time to enjoy your family life again.

Speak soon.

#Homeschool #Parenting #Education# Children #way of learning# Montessori# Education for a new world#