Making Learning Meaningful

Teachers and parents can teach everything that a child needs to know but the child may not remember everything that is taught.

Our children may not find the purpose of learning since they are unable see how the things that they learn can help them.

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Without the source of motivation, many children may go through the motion of learning to acquire head knowledge without a sense of need or purpose.

The need to set meaningful tasks for the concepts and skills that they learn in school and at home need to be intentional and purposeful.

This article is just a trigger to possible activities for educators and parents to explore other possible activities on their own with two examples.

Bake A Cake

Most children like cakes and it would be great for them to eat the cake that they bake on their own.

By providing an opportunity to bake a cake at home, children have the opportunity to use a measuring cap and read the instruction guide from a baking book.

Through this activity, they need to measure the different amount of ingredients to bake the cake.

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They also need to read the instruction guide that requires their reading skills.

They would have applied what they have learnt in Math and English lessons.

When they are struggling to measure using the measuring cap and comprehend the instructions from the baking guide, this is going to be a good teachable moment to indicate the importance of the topic of measurement as well as the English lessons for comprehension.

By allowing them to eat their own cake, children gain ownership and learning becomes meaningful and fun.

Garage Sales

Get our children to gather all their toys and items that they do not use anymore.

Organise the things to sell them at their own garage sales. Get them to handle the selling by themselves so that they get to use subtraction without a calculator when they need to return the change when bigger notes are given to them by their customers.

Through this simple activity, our children get to learn profit and loss in a real business.

They must learn how to use their oral skills to push up the price when customers are trying to bargain for a lower price.

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Before the garage sales, our children should write down all the good points of each product so that they can have the prior knowledge to convince their customers.

They have to use their writing skills and oral skills to provide a good summary of the products they have.

At the end, the greatest satisfaction is the amount of money that they manage to earn.

In Conclusion

There are many things we can do to make learning meaningful but it takes effort to do it.

Simple task like washing the clothes would require them to read the detergent box to know how much detergent to put into the washing machine for the amount of clothes they have.

They would need to measure the detergent and read the instructions without parent giving too much help.

Lots of learning can happen when parents and teachers start to let go of the passive mode of direct teaching.

Learning becomes meaningful and purposeful when children can apply what they learn in school to real life situation.

Disclaimer: This is my personal reflection and I am not in any position to instruct anyone what they should do. I am not responsible for any action taken as a result of this post. My post can only be a reference for your further research and growth. By reading this post, you acknowledge and accept that. All images and pictures were taken from google images that are free from copyright under labelled for reuse.

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://fun2learn.vornix.blog/2019/05/02/making-learning-meaningful/

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