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Feb 01, 2023
10 Ways to Help Your Child Learn Faster
Description: What if there were proven ways to turn your kid from the class clown into a genius? In this article, we are going to look at 10 highly effective methods that produce smart kids!
How to Improve Child’s Learning?
Every parent wants the best for their children and that includes giving them the best education possible. However, you are probably not aware of many techniques that can supercharge your kid’s studying and turn them into a little Einstein. In this guide, we are going to share 10 proven children’s learning techniques that will help your kid get straight As!
1. Sign Your Kid up for Music Lessons
One of the most effective ways to boost your child’s academic performance is to teach them a musical instrument. By learning how to play an instrument your child will improve their ability to concentrate, short-term memory, and reasoning skills. All of these factors result in higher levels of academic performance.
Don’t just take our word for it, let’s see what science has to say! Researchers from VU University of Amsterdam conducted a study of 147 children across a range of Dutch schools and put them through a structured musical curriculum that featured theoretical and practical instruction. 2.5 years later the researchers looked at the results and found the children who received musical lessons saw a significant improvement in academic results compared to the children who did not. So if kids want to know how to learn faster then picking up the piano or a violin is a great start!
2. Get Your Child Playing Sports
Many parents who want their children to succeed academically make the mistake of believing that sports will distract their children and make them too tired to study effectively. While intuitively this might make sense the scientific research has in fact shown the opposite. Children who regularly exercise and play sports do not only outperform their couch-potato peers when it comes to standardized tests, they are also able to more effectively overcome challenges and can focus for longer periods of time.
In 2007 a group of German researchers studied the ability of people to learn pre- and post-exercise. The results were dramatic as they found that people could learn new vocabulary 20% more effectively after exercising compared to before working out.
If you want your child to not only learn more effectively in the classroom but have a higher overall sense of well-being you should make sure they are exercising for 40 minutes at least 4 times a week!
3. Sleep Is Critical to Your Creating Smart Kids
It doesn’t matter if your child is hitting the books for hours every night and religiously completing their homework, all that good work is in vain if they are not getting enough sleep. Sleep is an incredibly powerful tool to help a child study and you need to create a disciplined schedule to ensure your child is getting at least 8 hours of high-quality sleep every night.
To highlight just how important sleep is for a kid's learning, researchers have found that missing an hour of sleep results in the loss of two years of cognitive function. Also, researchers found that on average A students received 15 minutes more sleep per night than B students and 30 more minutes than C students.
If you want to help your child become the best student possible, set a strict bedtime every night, ensure they get 8 hours of sleep, and don’t let them use screens or devices at least 1 hour before going to bed.
4. Make Learning Fun!
A great hack to turn kids' learning into a highly effective process is to use gamification. Gamification is where you simply turn learning into a game. For example, to learn how to do simple addition and subtraction you can play shop where your child is the customer and you are the shopkeeper. Your child can learn how to add and subtract by working out the correct change.
Gamifying learning is a highly effective strategy because children learn best when they are stimulated and have fun. Thanks to computers you can now find thousands of different learning games which can teach your children languages, mathematics, chemistry and everything in between!
5. Develop Your Child’s Memory
It doesn’t matter how hard your child studies if they fail to recall necessary information when under pressure for example in exams. Luckily, there are lots of little hacks, known as mnemonic devices, to improve a child’s memory.
Some of the most effective mnemonic devices include:
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Acronyms - Each letter in the word is the beginning of a phrase and each phrase describes a concept.
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Method of Loci - Associate words with places you have strong memories of, for example your home.
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Rhymes - By creating rhymes you tap into the musical side of your brain and are more likely to remember key concepts or pieces of information.
If you want to ensure your child never struggles with recall during a big exam again start using the above mnemonic devices!
6. Use Effective Learning Frameworks
To get children studying effectively you need to understand the process of learning and utilize frameworks. One of the most effective frameworks is known as the “Learning Pit”. The “Learning Pit” describes the process of learning when children start off overconfident then quickly realize they don’t understand and become discouraged. However, through repetition, encouragement, and breaking down the concept into simplified parts they slowly start to comprehend and understand. And then they finally conquer the new knowledge and feel a sense of triumph.
By understanding the “Learning Pit” you as a parent can guide your child's learning and not only prepare them for the struggle but reassure them and help them burst through the difficult stage to acquire new knowledge.
7. Make Sure Your Kid Hangs Out With the Right Crowd
All parents fear that their child will fall into the wrong crowd and pick up bad habits such as not studying and turning their attention to unhealthy activities. While in the past this might have been purely based on a mother’s intuition, science has now confirmed that worrying mothers were, in fact, right!
A study of college students at Dartmouth found that when poor-performing students with low grades switched roommates and started sharing living space with high achieving students their marks shot through the roof. This is because the poor performing students were inspired by the top students and their habits started rubbing off on them, leading to them studying more and striving to achieve their best.
8. Don’t Let Your Child Be Afraid of Making Mistakes
A reason why many kids’ learning stalls and even regresses is because they are afraid of making mistakes and looking stupid. Interestingly enough it is this avoidance of looking stupid that actually hurts a child’s ability to progress!
The only way to learn and improve in any skill is to try new things and make adjustments. When a child is trying something new it is totally natural for them to face resistance and make lots of mistakes. The more mistakes a child makes the more opportunity there is for improvement.
So, to ensure your child is learning effectively don’t let them fear failing- instead you should actively encourage them to take risks and fail. Then once they make a mistake you can calmly correct them and get them to repeat the task until they absorb the knowledge and improve their skills.
9. Build Self Confidence In Your Kid
Smart kids believe they are smart often way before they actually are! Self-confidence is an incredibly powerful thing that often results in a convergence effect where a seemingly average child believes they are good at something so they spend extra time performing this skill, aren't intimidated by setbacks, and get such great satisfaction from this activity that they eventually become an overachiever. You can turn your child into a star student by simply believing that they will succeed.
While this may sound a little crazy it is actually backed up by research! Researchers Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson performed an experiment where they told teachers that they had a number of gifted students in their class when in fact these children were chosen at random. 1 year later they tested the IQ of the “gifted” students and found they had on average received a 22 point boost in IQ.
10. Don’t Be Afraid of Rewarding Your Child
One of the most effective ways to get kids studying is to associate positive emotions with studying. But how do you do that? With treats! Trust us, your child is going to study extra hard on their next mathematics test if getting an A means they get to have their favorite junk food or they get that toy they have been dreaming of!
You shouldn’t just use physical treats to reward your child, you should also make the effort to compliment your child and celebrate small wins. For example, if your child managed to spell a word that they had previously struggled with, make the effort to compliment them and tell them how proud you are of them.
At the end of the day, children want to make their parents proud and if you set up an effective reward structure, where your child gets extra affection and treats when they work hard and perform well, they will quickly turn themselves into a top student!
While all of the children’s studying techniques and methods described above are highly effective we realize that not all parents have time to implement them. That is why we have created the Newtonshow holiday camp where we will help encourage your child to study by teaching them in a fun and playful manner and using state-of-the-art learning strategies to ensure they absorb as much knowledge as possible!
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