If you have a school-aged child, you are likely aware that for countries like Australia, the United Kingdom, and the US., there’s been a sharp and serious decline in educational results over the last decade or so. We’re seeing unprecedented numbers of students making it to high school level and being virtually illiterate, and don’t get me started on the level of disrespect most teachers are facing these days – there’s a reason teachers are leaving the field in droves. I’m not going to get into the backstory of why this is happening right now, but I will make a few suggestions about how you can help your little learner get the best out of their education!
Limiting Screen Time
I was at my local radiology department recently for a routine scan and noticed a little boy and his father come in. The little lad had his arm in a sling, and as the two of them sat down to wait, his little peepers were glued to the television suspended from the ceiling in the corner of the room despite the mind-numbingly boring news playing on it. A doctor came over to talk to them and ask the little boy if he had hit his head when he fell over that morning. The boy never took his eyes off the screen in the corner and barely noticed the doctor trying to talk to him. His father attempted to get the boy to focus on the doctor, to little avail, but they eventually got some monosyllabic answers to their questions. As soon as the doctor left, the father reminded the boy to pay attention to the doctor when he was asking him questions, and in response, the boy demanded the father’s phone so he could watch cartoons on it, and the dad handed it over. I was shocked at the behavior and the father’s handing over the phone with such a noncommittal response from the boy. If my daughter acted like that, I would be mortified, and she wouldn’t get my phone.
But the sad fact is that from what I hear from educators, this is pretty normal today, and kids with unrestricted screen time are extremely likely to be like this. They are also very likely to have worse academic results, poor social skills, and poor behavior at school. Even if you don’t want to limit your child’s screen time, you should absolutely be limiting what they’re viewing. Even on platforms dedicated to children’s programming (YouTube Kids, I’m looking at you), some extremely inappropriate content exists. And no child should have unrestricted access to the internet; there is just too much misinformation, disinformation, and adult content that they could stumble upon! There is one screen, however, that our daughter has unlimited access to, and that’s her Kindle, which leads me to my next suggestion: reading!
Reading
I was listening to an American teacher recently who was talking about finding class sets of books in her school’s library (you know, the ones, 30 or so battered old copies of the same book, sitting in a pile somewhere in the library) and reading with her class at the end of each lesson. She would have them all read along and take turns reading aloud to the rest of the class. She said she was called to the principal’s office and reprimanded for not focusing solely on preparing her students for the end-of-semester standardized testing. She argued that the reading was good for their education, but was told to stop and “just do the worksheets”. Being the excellent educator she is, she ignored this directive and continued to use the class sets and do daily reading with her students, though now somewhat in secret. At the end of the semester, her class scored significantly higher than any other in the school. She was called into a meeting of the school’s big-wigs, praised for her students’ results, and asked how she achieved this excellent outcome. She promptly told them that she had continued to read daily with her students and that, as a result, their language comprehension skills had vastly improved, along with myriad other skills, leading to their high results. Reading has long been associated with better outcomes in schooling, and we’ve found that once we hit on the right book for our daughter, she’s voraciously devoured books ever since! She’s reading three years above her school level, and her spelling is well above her age group. We give her a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and she tells us all about what she’s reading – it’s a lovely addition to family conversation, which leads me to my next suggestion.
Collaborative Learning
I’m one of those people who strongly believes in sharing knowledge… all the time! I often have little facts to share about all sorts of topics, one of which has become a running joke with my daughter and husband, when I told them, after hearing croaking from the creek behind our house, that ‘frogs are a great indicator of the health of a waterway’. They laugh about it fairly often, in that gentle way that loved ones do, when I come out with some new obscure but related factoid. Whenever my daughter or my husband asks me or me about something that we don’t know the answer to, we look it up together and find out! Answering her question often takes less than five minutes, and we’ve all learned something! It’s so easy with how busy we all are to say ‘I don’t know’ and leave it at that, but taking those few minutes to not only answer your child’s question but to encourage and reward their curiosity is so good for them! Something else you could do is take a look at my ‘Rounding Out the Edges’ series here on The Motherhuddle, where I outline simple educational activities you can do with your children.
Learning is a life-long journey that we should encourage our children to find joy in! We have been blessed to be able to home-school our daughter for the last three years, but even if we weren’t, we would still be encouraging her education in the ways I have mentioned above, and I hope you do, too! Happy learning!
