Are you ready?
Primary school. Your child is five years old, ready to start school. Is he or she ready? Do you need to help him or her prepare? Provide them with a boost?
The best thing that you can do for your primary student is to find a balance between work and play because both are essential to his or her development. We can’t force intelligence on them, but we can create a spark so that learning becomes something that they want to do.
That takes more support than you think. Sticking your child in front of a primary school computer program isn’t going to cut it. Sometimes, less is more.
Maximizing learning for primary students
Some research suggests that using a child’s age plus one year is a starting point for the number of minutes a child can attend to a single assigned task — 5 +1 minutes for a 5-year-old, 8 minutes for a 7-year-old, etc.
Think about this when you want to engage your child in learning. At SciMath123, one of our Science or Maths lessons may take 30 minutes for a primary student to complete. Don’t expect a five-year-old to do this all at once. A well-built lesson for any age chunks the material into short segments:
Watch a video
Learn with text
Try: interact with a lesson
Play a game
The Value of the Game
Most primary school children will not look at a game as an evaluation of their knowledge, but a parent can. Parents can track their children’s scores, see how many times they tried, and monitor their overall progress on the Learning Management System. Meanwhile, children focus on the game. They concentrate on achieving a winning score. And with instant feedback, they can try again and again until they get it right.
Those of us who play games, know that we choose to win, and we usually play until we do. When children engage in educational games, they play to win. They win and learn.