It should be no surprise that kids tend to have a hard time staying focused on their studies. In fact, many kids tend to try and avoid learning in favour of entertainment such as video games and YouTube. This is primarily because learning can be extremely boring when it’s not presented in a fun and engaging way.
Keeping Your Kids Engaged With Their Studies
So in this post, we’re going to share a few tips for keeping your kids engaged with their learning. With this advice, you’ll find that it’s much easier for your children to stay focused on their studies, and they’ll also find it more entertaining and enjoyable to learn new skills and keep up with their homework.
Make sure you have some kind of study plan or goals
Without goals, it’s difficult for your child to strive for something. Goals don’t need to be long-term things and instead, they can be much shorter term and easy to digest. For instance, you could set a simple obstacle for the future like “read two storybooks and write a small review of them”. This encourages your child to pick two books that they actually enjoy, and it also gets them to read a bit more. Reading is an extremely important skill for the long-term growth of your child, but it can also help spur their creativity while also teaching them new and unique skills.
So before you try to encourage your child to stay motivated during their studies, make sure you actually have a few goals in mind. Create a plan and try not to think too far ahead with it. At most, you’ll want to set monthly goals with smaller weekly targets to help reach that final goal. You don’t want it to feel too urgent as it might cause stress for you and your child, but it should be fairly easy to obtain at a leisurely pace and you should try to give them some kind of reward at the end of it for extra motivation.
Encourage your child to engage in real-world projects
One of the best ways to encourage your child to focus on their studies is to have them produce real-world results. For example, you could look for creative learning activities for 4-year-olds like painting and crafting things. This creates real-world things that you can save in your child’s room and display them as a way to show off their work. You could also engage in weekly activities such as cooking where they have direct input for the end results. Or if your child is older and they’re ready to start driving, using the practice examples on this test site could be the right route to take.
The purpose of this is to give your child a little more agency with their studies. When there are practical projects involved, it gets your child a little more excited about the prospect of actually making something instead of just sitting at home reading a book. The key here is to remember that the results you produce actually matter. Being practical and hands-on with your learning is extremely important and cannot be ignored. Many schools focus too much on the theory behind something and they restrict themselves to classroom activities that rarely have practical results. So the next time you think of a creative project to help your child learn something new, try and focus on activities that result in the creation of something that they can touch or show off to their friends.
Remember to avoid perfection and just focus on good results
Many children get upset when they’re unable to make something perfect. They get really hung up on the idea that the thing they’ve made isn’t perfect or extremely similar to what they’re trying to copy. As a result, they might feel like they’ve wasted their time, they might give up, or they might feel like they don’t have the skills to achieve something. This can be an extremely daunting time for your children, so it’s up to you to step in and try to encourage them to keep going. This is where it helps to give them some motivation by telling them to focus more on good results and less on perfection.
As most of us know, perfection isn’t really something we can attain as there’s always something greater to aim for. That’s why you should never focus on the “perfect” outcome for something. Instead, let your child fail now and then, give them encouragement when things don’t go well, and find ways to celebrate the progress they’ve made in addition to the results that they produce. This is one of the best ways to keep your child engaged and motivated, and it also teaches them an important life lesson.
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