One of the biggest problems many teachers have struggled with is how to keep a child’s attention during their lessons. However, as a parent who has chosen to homeschool his child, he thankfully doesn’t have to entertain the entire class, just one or two, maybe three kids at a time.
When you’re homeschooling your child, you have flexibility and choice on your side. For these reasons, there are quite a few ways to keep your child’s interest during the lessons. Here we will briefly cover three.
1. Teach your child when their energy is highest
A school generally has to start at a certain time in the morning and end at a certain time in the afternoon. Yes, there are schools that have classes in the afternoon and even classes in the evening, but in general the school starts in the morning and ends in the afternoon.
However, in a home school setting, you have the luxury of being able to take your lessons any time you want. So you can take advantage of this and show your child when his energy is highest.
Your child may be a morning person who wants to get the lesson out of the way so they can play for the rest of the day. Or maybe your child wants to play in the morning and work in the afternoon.
Another option is to spread your lessons out throughout the day, this way you ensure your child gets plenty of rest in between, and because the lessons are short, boredom is avoided.
2. Make your child’s lessons relevant, interesting and exciting
Your child already has many interests. Mine, for example, is about sharks, insects, snakes, and all sorts of weird creatures like trolls and werewolves. By linking his lessons to his interests, we can keep him interested in his lessons and he even comes to us with ideas for his lessons.
He’s only 5 years old, but he’s already familiar with more than 13 shark species, 71 underwater creatures, and 43 snake species, to name just a few. She knows how to read all their names, she knows what each one’s diet consists of, and she can show you on a map which countries in the world they are in.
In this way, we have not only taught readbut have also included biology and geography in his lessons too and he hasn’t even noticed. In fact, he loves his creatures so much that he wants to learn more and more about them.
I’m only mentioning my son to highlight that by making your child’s lesson relevant to his interests, you can “sneak” more information into each session without your child realizing it. A reading lesson also becomes a history, geography, science or biology lesson, effortlessly.
Not only will you hold your child’s attention but you’ll also have a little genie on your hands!
3. Use accelerated learning methods
Have you never heard of accelerated learning? Well, actually, it’s all the rage among scientists and academics these days.
Accelerated learning is any method that allows your child (or you) to learn a given subject faster than they would have done without it. An accelerated learning method, for example, might be to use a rhyme to remember a sequence of words or numbers, something that will stick in your child’s head.
It can also be used to feed your child vast amounts of information without much effort on your part. I used an accelerated learning method to teach my son to read, learn Spanish and also memorize the numbers from 0 to 100 in less than 10 days, when he was just 4 years old.
There are some interesting accelerated learning methods available that can firstly speed up your child’s learning process and secondly make the learning process so much fun that they learn without even knowing it.
Accelerated learning may not be for everyone, but as a homeschooling parent, it may be worth looking into and see if it fits your teaching and your child’s learning style.
With a little creativity and following these three very simple points, you are sure to capture and hold your child’s attention for much longer periods during home school lessons. And not only will your child be more attentive, he’ll have the added benefit that he’ll learn a lot more without even knowing it.