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A positive learning environment at home is crucial for your children’s success. Here are a few things you, as a parent, can do to ensure your child experiences a nurturing and educational environment in the comfort of your home.
1. Join Them in Their Learning Process.
Being with your children while they work and making them feel supported will motivate them immensely. Establish daily or weekly activities you can do together like reading before bedtime or watching the news.
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2. Praise and Display Their Work
Reinforcement in psychology is the idea of how the consequences of certain actions make the person more or less likely to perform that same action. Therefore, if parents praise their children’s work it will encourage them to keep working hard. A good way of doing this is by displaying their work around the house. Make sure they know you’re proud of it so they can be too!
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3. Use their interests as teaching opportunities
You don’t have to wait until you are inside to start teaching or guiding your child. Incorporate educational moments outside of “work time” by constructing on your child’s interests. For example, give your child a little background history of the sport they like while you practice it. Or watch a movie together that touches on subjects being learned.
Photo taken by: Isabella Arteaga
4. Create a “Prepared Environment”
Children are easily distracted so a decluttered, well lit, quiet room is ideal to achieve maximum concentration. Additionally, educator and physician Maria Montessori proposed an approach that encouraged freedom of movement within the study space. She thought that children would do better in a prepared environment in which the children get to choose what they want to work on that day. Try to encourage this self-paced, self-learning practice at home.
Photo taken by: Isabella Arteaga
5. Get Engaged
Show interest in what your child is learning. This will only make them more enthusiastic about their work. Maybe get them to explain the subject to you; this will not only help them understand it better themselves, but it will become a new conversational topic between you and strengthen your relationship.
Photo from: http://www.rd.com/advice/parenting/slideshow-13-things-your-childs-teacher-wont-tell-you/
Isabella Arteaga