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There's ONE skill a child needs to learn, TWO that you must nurture in them!

I am often asked what key areas I focus on when helping children learn. I get asked questions like, 
"Do you read with them regularly and make them answer comprehension questions? Do you give regular spelling and times table tests? Do you make them complete worksheets regularly? and so on...

The truth is, when it comes to learning, there are only two skills I aim to develop in children. And no, I don't mean numeracy and literacy 😉

When it comes to helping children learn, my main focus is NOT on developing their numeracy and literacy skills!
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The number of worksheets I give or activities I do or don't do with them is less important to me than developing these two skills I am about to talk about. In my opinion, they are the most important skills to nurture and develop in children when it comes to learning. They are not new, but I would like to emphasize them here and explain why they are the most important learning skills children need to help them learn throughout their lives.

Notice that I said that they are important skills to nurture and develop! It means that these are skills that our children are born with and we can either help them develop these skills or unfortunately in many cases, we can cause them to dwindle and almost be extinguished.

Firstly,
  • Independent Learning! - Heard it before? Yes we have, but we underestimate the importance of letting our children become independent learners. The truth is it takes time and patience, nurturing - to enable our children learn independently. Sometimes it takes forward planning and most importantly, it means we have to let them make mistakes! To be confident independent learners they will require regular practise and their successes will have to be celebrated whilst their mistakes are handled well to encourage them to try again. It is easier to spoon feed than to cultivate a learning habit. I can tell you that I found it so much easier to feed my babies pureed food than to let them handle food and figure it out themselves. I get it! Yet, I can't stress how important independent learning is for life-long learning. 
What we learn from our teachers is only a small part of the full picture. We only reach true mastery when we take the time to study on our own! 
A friend once said to me, "we hardly ever sit our children down to teach them how to play video games and yet they have no problem mastering the game all on their own".

Secondly,
  • A Love of learning! I've said this in other blog posts that children want to learn. They are born with a desire to learn, but like most gifts we are born with, if they are not nurtured and developed, we can lose them! Or it lies dormant until it is stimulated again. If we want our children to be life-long learners then we should cultivate in them a love of learning. We do this by making learning fun, thinking outside the box and using resources that the child finds interesting. Children enjoy learning when they are not forced, when they are presented with attractive options to choose from, when the activity is challenging but within their ability to achieve, when they are allowed to self discover and think independently, when they can find and correct errors themselves with a little guidance, when there are rewards for their achievements and they are not penalised for mistakes, when the parent/teacher takes an active interest in their learning, when they can see that progress is being made. 

So in summary, my advice to parents would be to focus on the process of learning, focus on creating independent learners who love to learn and want to continue to seek out information for themselves.  Focus on these skills more than the short term outcome of learning. Your focus should not be on how many sums they got right but instead on the learning process - did they try to discover more for themselves? Did they enjoy the activity? How can I ensure that the learning process is fun and challenging?

 Developing these skills will help remove a lot of the stress around learning, as they get older and help our children become life-long learners.

Learning is fun! Let's keep it that way 😎

See LET THE KIDS LEARN and THE POWER OF SELF CORRECTION below for more tips on how to teach your children to become independent learners and for how to cultivate a love of learning in your child.
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