How Parents Can Support Learning At Home In Fun Ways

Being present with your child(ren) and playing with them is the most important thing you can do for them.

Here’s how you can do this:

Get Off Your Device

Yup, we are starting with the elephant in the room.

Get off the device and stay off the device when with your children. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or any other platform have absolutely zero value compared to the value of being present and playing with your child(ren) every day.

Put your devices away and go outside with your kids for 20 minutes. Whether it is outside at the park or your own yard, get outside. Play impromptu sports or make-believe. Be a kid with your kids.

The learning that takes place from unscripted play is a precursor to developing emotional, social, and academic intelligence. 

Plus, it is fun and healthy for all and your kids will remember with fondness these good times with you for their entire lives.  This is real-life learning. 

Keep Things Natural

Wondering how to develop social and emotional intelligence? Take your child to the park or indoor unstructured play space and sit and read a book while they play with the other children who are there. 

Your child will see you practicing your literacy skills while enjoying an alternative form of entertainment and they will feel a sense of freedom of being able to free-range play.

The best part? In doing this they are developing social and emotional intelligence and problem-solving skills while interacting with a peer group outside of school.

“Play itself turns out to be the most important child development booster of all. If it were a class, there would be waiting lists to get in.” - Lenore Skenazy

The positive spin of reading a book, instead of tuning yourself out on your device, is that your child will experience you as an independent individual who is not reliant on a device for entertainment. Another perk is you are more present to hear and see, from a distance, how your child is navigating their play with others.

When your child is simply afforded space and time to interact with their peer group in an unstructured setting such as the park or indoor play space, they will naturally develop social and emotional intelligence and be able to problem-solve social interactions with a group of peers.

Trust Yourself And Your Child  

In our society today many of us have been led to distrust ourselves and trust something or someone external to us instead. We tend to point fingers and blame others for things that are uncomfortable.

Listen to your children, respect them and work with them collaboratively on daily tasks at home. Give them responsibilities and consequences.  Discuss uncomfortable situations as a family instead of avoiding them. Act instead of reacting.

Offer Responsibility

Provide your child with family and individual responsibilities. There is an abundance of household chores that your child can and will be successful at if you simply offer these responsibilities.

Children as young as 5 years old who are expected to maintain a clean room, feed/walk the pet, deliver clean laundry to various rooms, take out the trash, empty the dishwasher and make their own school lunches become successful, independent people.

These small actions allow your child to develop a sense of autonomy and purpose. Children will feel needed and to feel needed is a strong human emotion.  

Unfortunately, many parents believe that by doing things for their child(ren), they can avoid power struggles, make life easier for everyone, and limit conflicts, but this type of thinking will only hinder your a child’s development.

When assigning family responsibilities, you will have to expect a bit of pushback and/or failure to complete the tasks at the beginning of this new practice, but just like adjusting to a newborn baby’s ever-changing needs, so too will your children adjust to provide for themselves and their family.

Develop Life Skills

Emotional and social intelligence is key to making decisions and taking action. With over 8 billion people in our world, one would think there would be a multitude of opportunities to develop social skills. Unfortunately, the increase in the human population has had a reverse effect.

Too many people + small spaces + too many attentional technologies = deferred sociability.

A residual effect of this equation is the decline of attention and retention skills in children and adults. Teachers are reporting seeing more and more of their students struggle to attend to tasks and retain new and/or old learning.

Attention and retention skills are a prerequisite, and therefore, invaluable for not only basic survival but for living a happy, healthy, and purposeful life.

Take time to be present with your child(ren) every day through play and by gathering together to play a card game, reading a book, or practicing an academic skill. Create an idea jar and continually add to it as you and your child think of more learning opportunities. Take turns pulling a daily choice of what life skills activity will be played and practiced.

There is no time for excuses. Your child will grow up and leave home in the blink of an eye.  Take the time it takes to make this happen for the benefit of your family, your child, and yourself as an individual.

So with this all being said… what is the bottom line?

Play, be present, and learn life skills together.

“You can take the play out of learning, but you can’t take the learning out of play.” - Brock Dubbles

Thank you for reading this blog post on how parents can support learning at home in fun ways.

The lesson plans in our K-6 Learning Library will help you and your child or students right now and for years to come. The best part is you can edit these resources so that your child or students can focus on what they can do right now and build on it rather than internalize that they are not performing at grade level.