Friday, March, 29,2024

NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS TO ENHANCE CHILDREN’S EDUCATION!

When it comes to our children, most kids, aided by us, their parents, will make generic new year’s resolutions such as being healthier, eating better, and so on. Neither will our children stay invested in these statements, nor will we. I propose that why not, for the sake of our children and their long-term happiness, the resolution this year, be directly related to education. To correct, in some measure, the dwindling interest and ‘fun’ in education and restore it using an experiential, practical approach?

FUN… WHY & AMP; HOW?
As the very simple and straightforward title of this article suggests, Make Fun-Learning and TravelLearning Approaches Your Child’s New Year Resolution; why this specifically? And what precisely do I mean by Fun-Learning & Travel-Learning Approaches? Let us examine this.

Fact – children in classrooms read books. These textbooks or reference books serve as the primary source of their knowledge. Let us draw a parallel. We eat food at home. It is our primary source of nutrition. It is good as well – clean, sanitary, safe, healthy, and in most cases, tasty too! We still get bored and want to eat at a restaurant, don’t we?

It works similarly with learning. Reading a text or a reference becomes a chore and a bore. The mind shuts off and becomes fatigued by constantly having to ingest knowledge in this manner. It needs a ‘change’ in the scenario, however temporary, shortlived, or superficial.

This is where the FUN aspect of learning comes in. At home at least, in an environment controlled and administered by us parents, we can ensure that at least not ALL learningtime, feels like the same-old boring drag. How? By making it fun. How?

Study outdoors. Don’t subject your child to their desk and chair. Gardens, lawns, and parks are great places to study. These environments positively predispose the child and put the learner in a great frame of mind to imbibe.

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This itself creates mental fatigue and boredom. Essentially, we are recreating a second-school, postschool, each day, for our children. Let us stop this and encourage them to selfstudy. It will be more fun, I promise.

Make Time. As parents, we have no time for our children. We may be justified to an extent in the alibi that the reason we don’t have time is that we are building a better life for them. Having said that, children don’t just need ‘facilities and infrastructure’, they need their parents! And they don’t just need their parents for emotional growth, having parents around can be immensely beneficial in making mundane things fun. Study with your kids. They will enjoy it infinitely more than being in an extra class!

TRAVEL - EXPERIENCE Makes You UNDERSTAND:
A Travel-led approach to education also has similar benefits to a fun approach. Travel puts concepts, fundamentals, and bookish knowledge into a real-world, practical perspective. It gives children, students and learners a chance to ‘experience’ something that hitherto they could only read about. A concept that otherwise remains a concept is turned into a reality they can share, see, touch, and feel.

Travel also simplifies and exemplifies scholastic lessons. Something that might be difficult to understand from a textbook might become more easily digested, and permanent when experienced during travel. A naturally occurring phenomenon such as birth, if for instance, viewed in the wild during travel, will stay with a student much longer than merely being told about it in class. The moment we equate a lesson with a practical, hands-on experience that travel provides, the learning is more enjoyable, more immersive, more permanent, and deeper. It can be:

A field trip to a local restaurant where one practically experiences various aspects of Commerce and Accounting practices play-out A holiday to Europe that encompasses lessons ranging from History to the Arts, Literature to many other subjects A curated travel experience that we design for our children that is neither far away or expensive, something as simple as a day trip to a close-by farm, where children will experience, and learn through those experiences, various aspects of multiple subjects ranging from science to mathematics. The simple point behind all this is to make learning, which was once fun and interesting, the same again. To alleviate at least some of the intense pressure that our children are in today, by making studies not ONLY about grades and GPAs but also about just being children, and experiencing the joys of discovery!

The education environment today has become a toxic gas-chamber of unbreathable proportions with too much trauma as a result of academic and societal expectations, ones that are simply too unrealistic and out of reach. This is deeply impacting children’s mental well-being and causing mental distress that manifests in various ways including and not limited to physical illness and disease, emotionally stunted growth and academic as well as career decisions that end up in frustration and discontentment. All this can be seized, or at the very least, mitigated, by making learning fun! And what better time and opportunity to make that change, than at the cusp of a brand new year?

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