Motivating a child to learn isn’t easy for any parent or teacher.
Behavior
How to Motivate Your Child or Student
Motivating a child to learn isn’t easy for any parent or teacher.
This is especially true when it comes to little ones that aren’t born excellent learners. While personality and disposition can play a large part in whether a child is naturally motivated to learn, most kids develop the ability to become good learners through education and schooling. All children are different, but for any child, it’s possible to become a good learner, even if the process isn’t natural at first. Any child can go far with proper motivation and the aptitude to learn.
When developing good learning in students and children, parents and teachers often make the first mistake of limiting how they can learn. This is especially true outside of the classroom. While lessons are the primary way children, grow academically, intellectually, and socially, learning shouldn’t stop when the school day is over. To motivate and encourage a child to continue learning, take those lessons out of a classroom setting and extend them beyond only school-based activities. Expanding the scope of their learning opportunities is essential to enhance a child’s ability and desire to learn.
So, how to motivate my child to learn? These tips and strategies provide the basis for improving the learning and motivation of children. Using them correctly can help your child discover the joy of learning, either as a parent or as a teacher.
Education resources
1. Encourage reading as a pastime
For many children, reading can be the key to success when it comes to learning. At a minimum, learning to read and continuing reading provides excellent motivation to maintain and develop further. For teachers and parents, encouraging a love for reading can go a long way for a child and develop their passion for learning. Children that struggle with reading will also struggle with learning often in the long term.
Not only does reading help develop a child’s vocabulary, but it also provides them with better ways to communicate formally and process difficult concepts. Children can gain skills far beyond simply increasing their language performance through reading. Children who focus on reading, and learn to read well, can enhance their ability to learn in all manner of subjects, including:
- Math
- Biology
- History
- Art
- Physics
By helping children to develop reading skills, and encouraging reading as a favorite pastime, motivating them to learn is easy. To facilitate this motivation, reading to your child and having them read aloud are vital first steps. For teachers and parents, 20 minutes of extra reading per day – either as family time or homework – can make a huge difference. Offer a wide variety of reading materials, and children will soon learn to love reading.
Making reading fun is critical to help children develop into good readers, removing the frustration for children that don’t enjoy reading at first. By letting children pick their reading material and starting with subjects that interest them, motivation to learn can be achieved easily over time.
2. Give back some control
For some children, education can feel like a chore because the adults around them completely control every step of the way, whether it’s their teachers or parents. When children feel control is taken from them, or they feel overly controlled in their learning, withdrawal from learning is a common result. According to the Alliance for Self-Directed Education, allowing children a little more freedom while still providing guidance is an important part of teaching them at home or in the classroom. This allows a child to take control of their learning experiences by allowing their direct input into their learning choices. The ideal way to implement this is to offer your child different options for learning.
Some examples of this would be:
- Allowing them to decide on the subject matter for a writing project
- Providing them with choices of books to read
- Giving them options for relevant scientific experiments with the same results
Another way to give your child greater control and motivation is by allowing them the choice over extracurricular activities. By providing your child with that control regarding how and style they learn, their motivation increases effortlessly over time.
3. Make communication open
Open communication is vital to any relationship, especially those with children. Encouraging your student or child to express their opinion about their learning and education is essential. By providing an open, welcoming atmosphere where they feel they can share their views, children feel motivated to continue learning.
If your child feels they can turn to you if they are struggling or stuck and feel heard, they think their opinion matters. This is a must to motivate your child and validate and support their feelings surrounding the learning process in general.
4. Focus on the interests of your child
When a child is particularly interested or engaged in a particular subject or area of learning, they are far more likely to receive a fulfilling education. Of course, this doesn’t mean only teaching your child the things they like.
Instead, to help motivate your child to learn, encourage self-exploration and learning on subjects the child is interested in. For example, children interested in dinosaurs, animals, or any other subject should be encouraged and challenged to learn more from books and resources about their areas of interest. Learning can be made fun and easy by simply focusing on your child’s interests as a teacher or parent.
5. Utilize different styles of learning
Each child is different. As such, parents and teachers should pay attention to the learning styles and preferences that better suit each child to help them to succeed. While some children have a particular form of learning that suits them, others have a mix of styles that work best together. There is no wrong way to learn, so encouraging your child to do what feels natural can greatly improve the quality and rate of learning.
The seven fundamental styles of learning are as follows:
- Auditory
- Visual
- Physical
- Verbal
- Solitary
- Social
- Logical
Each method is equally important to providing children with the best learning experience. Spending time learning, experimenting, and understanding which method works best for them can be an excellent way to boost motivation and help your child or student take their learning to the next level.
Whatever kind of learner a child is, there are plenty of resources to support visual learners and those who prefer physical, verbal, or social learning. It’s all about finding the right ways to teach to motivate students and children to learn.
6. Be enthusiastic
If you’re less than enthusiastic about the learning process, your child will be too. Being passionate about learning new and exciting things is a great way to help motivate children, allowing them to see that learning is fun for others.
By looking at learning as a discovery of new things, from science to writing, history, and math, children will soon become enthusiastic about discovery. Taking any opportunity to learn alongside your child can be an excellent tool for motivation.
7. Use game-based strategies to make learning enjoyable
The concept of game-based learning has been on the scene for a long time. An educational tool that provides ample opportunity for better education, children are motivated to develop skills through enjoyable tasks and fun games. By engaging children in game-type learning, they can connect the process of learning with something pleasant and entertaining. This is particularly beneficial for working in groups in a classroom setting, allowing children to compete to win and learn more.
Game-based learning is an innovative way to teach many subjects and encourages children to learn actively rather than passively – an excellent choice for children that need a little extra push to succeed.
8. Put the focus on what they are learning instead of how they are performing
It can be easy for teachers and parents to focus on performance as milestones for how well a child is learning. But by focusing on what they are learning instead of how well they are testing, it’s far easier to provide more motivation than simply looking at letters on a page.
Of course, performance is vital for education in the long run. But encouraging children to communicate their actual learning allows for better focus on deeper learning and improvement over time rather than the typical black-and-white focus on a pass or fail.
9. Improve your child’s organization
For the vast majority of children, the organization doesn’t come easy. Whether it’s a messy bedroom, lost school equipment, or forgotten gym kit, organization isn’t naturally present in all our little ones. However, as a teacher or parent, you can work with your child to improve their education organization, helping them feel motivated to learn without distractions.
10. Celebrate and recognize the achievements
Whether it’s something tiny or achievement that’s a big deal, taking the time as a parent or teacher to celebrate and recognize children’s achievements can be an excellent motivator. Positive reinforcement is vital for children to be motivated, and being consistent with the praise and support you offer can make all the difference.
Finishing a challenging project, for example, deserves a special something as a reward. A parent could celebrate doing well on a science test by making their favorite dinner. The list of options is endless, but consistently applying positive reinforcement is the perfect way to bring more learning motivation into your child’s life.
11. Acknowledge the good things
If your child struggles with learning, it may seem counterproductive to focus on the strengths. But for children to have a healthy academic and emotional environment, acknowledging the good things can be vital. Another form of reinforcement that’s positive for learning is allowing children to play to their strengths and know they are doing something right can provide excellent motivation. Focusing on the negative aspects, such as failures, will do nothing beyond shaming the child and making them want to pull further away from learning. Be constructive, and don’t focus on the bad.
12. Make learning a daily occurrence
It might sound like the stuff of children’s TV, but learning every day is easier than you think if you take the right steps. Encouraging your child as a parent or teacher to open their eyes to the world around them, research their interests in their own time, or even do things they’ve never done before can all help to promote learning. Thinking critically is a vital skill for any child, and encouraging that can help boost your child’s motivation to learn like nothing else.
However, if you motivate your child to learn, offering them support and care can go a long way. How do you motivate your child or students to succeed?
