Children like to learn. They can learn just about anything, if it is explained clearly enough.
Young children love repetition. Ask any parent who has read Goodnight Moon 900 times (or, like this grandmother, has watched the same Teletubbies tape uncountable times.)
Children thrive on drill and rote learning. It’s the grownups who make a fetish of variety, choice, and educational theory.Admittedly non-academic influences can affect a child’s public school experience, but when it comes to the learning process itself, if children are bored or frustrated with school, it is probably for one of the following reasons:
1. They have already mastered the material being presented and are bored and resentful at having to sit through it again for the sake of those who haven’t learned it.
2. They have not mastered the preliminary skills and information needed to understand what is being presented and they’re being made to feel stupid.
3. They are being taught by teachers who are themselves inadequately-prepared.
4. Their teachers could do a better job, but are prevented from providing quality teaching because of school policies, poor administrators, or non-academic parental priorities.
Newborn babies are learning organisms. They have a passion to learn. Parents are granted five precious years in which to nurture this passion before exposing children to public education.
Make no mistake about it. Public school is not the child’s first experience with learning. The home is.
When a child enters kindergarten or first grade, the foundations of academic success or failure have already been laid.
The parent’s role as teacher begins with the first touch and doesn’t end–if it ever ends–until the child is an independent adult.