Design learning lessons around an activity. Students learn through discovery, and by directly involving students in hands-on activities, the lesson becomes student-centered with a focus on children’s own relevancy and active participation in meaning-making, inspiring children to engage meaningfully in the lesson.
Give children an authoritative voice. Listening is an important skill, but a passive one. Encourage children to teach you about what they’ve read, seen or heard. Recalling their own interests and informing you of them not only engages children but encourages information recall and synthesis, which are two major components of learning. Inspire children to write reports or design projects based on books or films of their choosing to encourage and spark a genuine interest in learning, while providing an opportunity for children to practice and demonstrate critical thinking skills.
Make learning a social activity. At the heart of all knowledge is a meaningful exchange between two or more people, sharing and generating ideas. By placing children in small groups to work collaboratively on projects, you are not only encouraging social development skills but also providing children with a way to form and share ideas with their peers, which can foster and inspire an interest in the lesson and promote learning.
Integrate technology in children’s academic tasks. Technology is not only essential to most careers in the 21st century, it also provides a way for children to actively engage in learning. Computer games, digital music presentations, online webquests and video messages all actively engage learners through hands-on and discovery learning, fostering a desire to learn.
Cater to and encourage children’s personal interests. If your child takes a natural interest in dinosaurs, nurture and inspire a desirability to learn by providing your child with relevant books and projects through which your child can continue to explore and learn about what intrigues her. For whole-group classroom instruction, foster learning by design activities that require students to express their interests, likes and other personal aspects of themselves in order to invest them in assignments and projects and allow them to explore lessons in relation to who they are.
Differentiate instruction to keep children’s interests and reach all learners. For example, an at-home activity or in-class lesson should comprise several different steps, procedures or instructional approaches to keep children’s interests and reach learners of different learning styles. Active, student-centered activities and lessons should include auditory, hands-on, kinesthetic and visual elements and should involve a combination of lecture, group work or discussion and independent tasks.