36 tips to Encourage kids to study – Comprehensive parenting guide
How to make my kids learn? Almost 20,000 people ask questions of similar meaning to google every single day. And there are several thousands across the world who some or the other day discuss this problem with someone.
Teachers and educators have written a lot of advice and still the problem persists. Why? execution. It’s easy to say but hard to do.
Here are 36 actionable tips, tricks, and pieces of advice to make kids interested in studying. Have been summarising them from my own experience of homeschooling my kids and helping other kids.
- Create a Study Schedule: Creating a study schedule is something that all the generations have been doing but rarely being followed. The problem is consistency. It’s hard to rigorously follow a study schedule for children. Hence be moderate and flexible. Best is to have a change in your schedule before it starts being abandoned.
- Use Positive Reinforcement: Reward progress and good study habits with praise and appreciation. Celebrate the milestones with small gifts and parties. But don’t bribe. Don’t make it a business of give and take.
- Make Learning active and fun: Incorporate games, toys, quizzes, charts, flash cards, audio, videos, and activities into study time.
- Set Achievable Goals: Break down tasks into manageable steps to avoid overwhelm.
- Incorporate Technology: Use educational apps and websites to make learning interactive. But do this wisely.
- Create a Dedicated Study Space: A quiet, organized area can help kids focus. Natural spaces with plenty of natural light and air are best suited for learning. Bring change into study space sometimes.
- Be Involved: Show more interest in children and less in their books and exams. Children should genuinely feel for whom you are doing all these.
- Encourage Curiosity: Allow kids to ask questions and explore topics they are naturally curious about. Let them research beyond course material. Let them find their answers over the internet and other reference books.
- Relate Subjects to Real Life: Show how academic topics are relevant in everyday life.
- Encourage Reading: Make a variety of books available and read together.
- Provide Breaks: Short breaks can help kids stay focused during longer study sessions.
- Stay Positive: Maintain a positive attitude about children and their study, under all circumstances.
- Help making a group: Studying with peers makes learning more enjoyable. Help your children make a group of 3 to 5 like-minded friends who discuss and study together.
- Teach Time Management: This is something where every child, parent and teacher fail. We forget developing children. Help kids prioritize tasks and manage their time effectively.
- Teach to focus: One more. We keep saying focus, focus on your study. But do we ever teach how to focus? Developing focus is a skill. Work to teach that skill.
- Set a Good Example: No that strictly doesn’t mean to compare your kids abilities and scores with yours or other children. Be a good example by showing your own commitment to learning and self-improvement.
- Incorporate Hands-On Learning: Use experiments, project work and practical activities. You can do this for any subjects and not just science.
- Use Storytelling: Turn lessons into stories to make them more engaging.
- Set Up Study Challenges: Make studying a fun competition for a child with themselves. Setup challenges and milestones and celebrate the achievements of those. You can sometimes use gifts and parties as appreciation and motivation.
- Encourage Note-Taking: Teach effective note-taking strategies that involve graphical representation of the learnings. This is great for memorization and quick reviews.
- Stay in sync with the other counterpart: If you are a teacher, your parent is your counterpart, and vice versa. Work with the other counterpart to understand and support the curriculum.
- Create a visual rewards system: Create a visual reward system. Take for example a craft piece where a spaceship goes up with every milestone or success.
- Limit Distractions: Minimize noise and electronic distractions during study time. Some kids focus better with light background music. Highly personal though.
- Encourage Critical Thinking: Ask open-ended questions and encourage kids to think deeply.
- Stay Organized: Help and inspire them to keep their everything organized. A mess in the room and study area is a loss of focus and time both.
- Take care of physical and mental fitness: Make sure you integrate a variety of fitness activities, exercises, meditation, solving puzzles and other brain activities into the daily routine. Also encourage reading, art and sport activities, music and adequate amount of TV shows too. Take care of enough sleep and nutritional food as well.
- Find the bright spots: Know what your child is doing great. Encourage kids to explore subjects they excel in. Repeat the patterns they are succeeding with.
- Discuss Future Goals: Help kids see how education fits into their future aspirations. Discuss how learning things will help them in future. But be logical. Else they will tell you about the most successful dropouts of the world. 🙂
- Encourage Self-Assessment: Teach kids to assess their own work and progress.
- Involve Them in Planning: Let kids have a say in their study schedule and methods.
- Use Humor: Make learning enjoyable by incorporating humor.
- Introduce Variety: Don’t be monotonous. Mix up subjects and activities to keep things interesting.
- Teach Study Techniques: Introduce techniques like summarization, questioning, and reviewing.
- Provide Feedback: Give constructive feedback about their work. Be truthful. Giving feedback is about being a coach and not a judge.
- Allow Independent Learning: Encourage them to explore and learn on their own at times. A person feels immensely motivated when they know someone trusts them.
- Be Patient: Understand that learning is a long process and not a 100 meter race. Be patient with progress.
Implementing these tips can help make studying a more enjoyable and effective experience for kids.
About Author
Prashant Mamtora is an entrepreneur and homeschooling parent of two. He is happy to discuss parenting and entrepreneurship related queries. He can be contacted here. He is also the founder of havi.co.