Making English Lessons Fun for Kids
So your child doesn’t want to do their homework. They don’t enjoy their after school tutoring sessions, they would rather be kicking a ball around with their friends. Let’s talk about why, and what can be done to change that.
Traditional learning methods for children are a slog (boring and hard work). Imagine you are 12, and there are a million things you could be doing. You could play with the dog, ride your bike with your friends, play that new expansion that came out for your favourite game. You spend all day in a room at school with adults telling you what you need to learn, and they hardly ever explain why or how that will be helpful for you. You and all the other kids learn the same things, but you are all different people. When you put in a lot of effort and create a really good piece of work, the best you can expect is a little tick and a smiley face. The video games you play reward you with new clothes, awards, new items and new game modes, so why work so hard for a tick and smiley face?
There are two key things to keep in mind when supporting a child learning anything, but especially languages: fun and reward.
The key to fun is play and humour. If anything can be turned into a game, I will do it. Play is the best learning experience for anyone. They get to practice what they need to learn to be an adult, but they get to learn it in a completely safe environment. If a kid makes a mistake in my lessons, we will make a little joke about it and try again. If a kid wants to learn vocabulary about beaches, we will look at an illustration (artistic drawing) of a beach and I will challenge that child to name as many things as they can. Then later we will play hang man or taboo (a word guessing game) with that vocabulary. To a child, this is play, it doesn’t feel like work.
Sometimes you do have to present some learning as ‘work’, and this is where reward comes in. Now your kid has played a lot and learned while having fun, its safe to add a little ‘hard work’ into the mix. Children love the genuine approval of a friendly adult, so they are already motivated to try their best. Add in a little reward and praise, and your child will not only enjoy their English lessons, but work a little extra on their homework.
One of my 12-year-old learners really enjoys my quirky sense of humour and all the strange little knickknacks (decorative objects) I have around my office. To reward him, I challenge him to work hard on an exercise, and promise to show him a funny knickknack on the webcam. One example was “try really hard on this grammar exercise and I will show you what a square panda looks like”. He was curious! He wanted to know what a square panda toy looked like. He had to work hard, but he knew he could make mistakes and that would be ok. So he worked hard, and at the end he got to see the square panda, and we laughed and joked about why a fully grown adult would have such a thing in their office. Sometimes I reward him with funny pictures like “Meowls”. Meowls are cute pictures of cats and owls mixed together. So after a difficult exercise we spend 5 minutes talking about the cute meowls, describing them in English, and talking in the conditional tenses about what we would do with a pet meowl if we had one.
Why do I have square pandas in my office? Because they are fun. If this is how you would like your child to improve their English skills, you can contact me by clicking the button below. If you would like to learn more about the lessons and services I offer, click the other button below.
