31st January 2020 14:55
By Blue Tutors
The tutoring pedagogy we use is something we encourage every parent to read. We would like everyone to be more aware of what a good lesson should look like; it means that we receive better feedback from students and their parents. However, it’s also something which can be valuable for a parent when helping their children learn from an early age.
The key message is that children need to be given the space to learn and understand what they are doing. So often parents see a child make a mistake and quickly correct it rather than allowing the child to identify the mistake him/herself. This isn’t just with schoolwork, it can also be true when a child is playing but playing with something designed to develop certain logical or creative skills, like Lego.
We understand the difficulty of holding the space effectively for young children. Parents might not have as much time as they would like to sit with their children and help, and leading a child to a quick solution feels like a timesaver. Of course the goal should be to help a child learn how to build the Lego so they can do it unaided in future, not to complete their new Lego set as quickly as possible.
This method can present difficulties for all students, but in particular younger students become frustrated more quickly when they struggle to complete something, especially when they’re aware that the adult helping them could just give them the answer immediately. It becomes a delicate balance between making the child feel like they are improving, but at the same time not doing everything for them.
Another important factor for younger students is not providing lots of distractions which pull them away from the learning activity. As long as there is something at arm’s length away which seems more fun than the misunderstood current activity, the child is likely to give up and do something else. This might explain why many parents see such a change in attention span between the classroom and learning at home.
The better learning environment a parent can create at home, the better their children are likely to learn. It’s important to realise that the time spent thinking about something difficult and trying to understand it is valuable time, and this happens far less when a child has a distraction to stop them thinking, or is just given an answer.