Learning
should be fun to grab students' interest with engaging lessons
If the longstanding TV program Sesame Street teaches anything,
it is that kids don't need dry lessons and humorless lectures to learn. In
fact, when teachers add fun activities to their classroom agendas, they ignite
kids' natural curiosity about more than just the three R's.
And that's not the only reason learning should be fun. The
real benefit is that when children are taught early on to enjoy learning,
they'll make it a lifelong habit.
Learning
Fun: What It Is and Isn't
When teachers talk about fun lesson plans, they don't mean
replacing traditional school work with back-to-back board games. Nor do they
mean diluting academic standards to the point that coloring within the lines
can substitute for having to write grammatically correct sentences.
What fun learning does mean is that teachers use
non-traditional lessons to teach essential skills. Why non-traditional? Because
allowing students to create a PowerPoint presentation rather than draft a
five-paragraph essay allows them to demonstrate knowledge of a topic that might
not grab their interest in a way that does.
Naturally
Curious
The theory behind educational fun comes down to this: children
are born with a hunger for knowledge about the world around them. Fun learning
is based on a fact that's almost inarguable: learning doesn't begin on the
first day of kindergarten. It starts at birth. The 100 million or so cells in a
newborn's brain allow infants to soak in knowledge just by observing the world,
by hearing the sound made by a rattle or seeing their mother's face.
As babies grow, their natural curiosity about the world
they've been observing leads them to make discoveries. They discover, for
example, what happens when they trap a lightning bug in a jar or stick a fork
into an electric outlet. These natural desires children have -- to observe,
explore, and discover -- are traits teachers are hoping to provoke when they
design classwork around fun activities.
Enjoy,
Ms. Nora Sierra
EC Assistant Principal
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