School can become routine and boring after a while, whether your child is in a regular school or being homeschooled. Giving your kids the motivation to learn takes effort, but it is worth it if they enjoy learning throughout the school year. Here are some ideas to keep learning fresh and interesting.
- Plan your child’s lessons around her interests. For example, if she’s hooked on whales for some reason, plan a project where she has to research, write about, and present information about whales. You could add in an addition lesson by having your child write out an addition problem describing the number of whales she sees in two magazine pictures and then adding them to find the total number of whales.
- Praise your child’s work. Avoid constantly nagging and correcting your child. Praise his efforts and his progress more than you point out mistakes.
- Vary up your child’s work load some. Instead of doing three pages out of the social studies book one day, go on a field trip to learn more about the topic in the book. Use a different book to learn the same material. Go to the library to check out a chapter book about the lesson.
- Add in some extracurricular activities to your child’s school day. Park play days with your local homeschooling group, a music class through a co-op, or maybe a gymnastics class can break up the school day and week and help keep your child motivated by offering lessons in areas other than the required math, language arts, science, and social studies.
- Set an example of learning for your kids. If your kids see you reading a book on a topic you want to know more about, they’ll be more likely to want to do the same. If you take a language class and do homework for it, your kids will see how important learning is even when a person is older.
Be your children’s learning guide instead of a rigid school teacher. Allow them to creatively explore their interests, and build in some mini-lessons in other subjects as they learn about their passions. Give them some unrestricted time to be themselves when they cooperate with the lessons of the day. All of these things will give your child motivation to learn. You’ll have a more harmonious homeschooling environment when you do.
What do you do to give your kids motivation to learn?
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