As a parent, you want your children to have the best chance at success when it comes to their learning and cognitive development, and that means continuing to foster their learning at all times.
Outside of school hours, there is always the confusion about how and what types of learning tasks to consider. That being said, it’s always best to start off by being committed and engaged in your child’s learning and working to develop a plan that complements the types of techniques that they’re undertaking in preschool.
You should always do your best to check which types of learning styles your child follows in preschool prior to developing your at-home system. Though any system should work, it’s always best to have some sort of at-home play involved which harmonizes with what your little one is already being taught and learning at school.
Let’s take a look at how to get some of those preschool techniques into your parenting at home!
Loose Parts and Patternation Playtime
If your child is enrolled in a preschool that focuses on child-led learning, then there’s a good chance that the loose parts play or patternation learning is something that they’re involved with on a routine basis.
These types of play times essentially provide your little one with an array of different object sets, with which they can pile up in ‘similar looking’ piles, or in separated piles – among many other things. This is essentially a play in which they are able to exercise their curiosity and pattern/object recognition skills and work to determine what is what, and what goes where.
You can find a great explanation by Gowrie NSW on loose parts playtime and why you should consider implementing this play into your child’s at-home learning.
Convert Daily Activities into a Learning Experience
Another key way to bring preschool home is to implement as much learning as possible into previously mundane activities. Whether it’s bathtime, the drive to school or just about anything else, it’s a good idea to work to find out how you can implement some way to foster curiosity or a learning experience into these activities.
Something as simple as pointing at things out of the car or a bedroom window is enough to spike your child’s exploratory curiosity and get them looking for more things out of their window. In some cases, you may find that allowing smaller children to play videos even has a suite of benefits when it comes to their learning.
Another way to inspire and ‘prompt’ is to consider counting things in a room as a means to promote spatial awareness.
Reading Each Evening
It isn’t a secret that your child is likely being read to during their day at preschool, and so a book in the evening before bed is a great way to continue this through to your home.
One thing to keep in mind is that when reading to your little one, you always want to make sure that the process is as slow-paced and focused as possible. When we rush through any task, not only reading, we’re teaching our youngsters that this is an unimportant topic or activity and can be skipped over.
With that in mind, a slow reading session in the evening before bed as a wind down is a good idea.
Implement Child-led Learning
As we mentioned above, in preschools with child-led learning you’ll want to give your child plenty of freedom to simply focus on what they’d like to do and explore during the day.
With child-led learning, you’re giving your preschooler the chance to focus and explore the topics, activities and things they’d like to do and because they’re already motivated to do such tasks, they’re going to be more enthusiastic to do these tasks.
You will find that when you leave your little one to do their own learning, they do so at such a depth that you won’t typically need to intervene to encourage or even prompt them to go further.
Research and studies have shown us that when we allow our children to direct their own learning, they probe and analyse items and even communicable topics so deeply that they teeter on understanding the fundamentals of a specific topic. This was outlined in that children prompted with a superhero topic were essentially developing their understanding of superheroes to the point where the question of ‘What makes a superhero?’ and ‘Why do we need superheroes,’ appeared in the conversations of little ones.
That being said, a child-focused learning system is another great technique to implement into the home.
Conclusion
With all of the above points out of the way, it can be said that implementing preschool learning techniques into your daily parenting is as simple as encouraging an environment of curiosity and exploration. It’s always good to keep your child motivated to learn and look for avenues to explore, which will in turn leave your child with the sense that learning and seeking out answers and explanations is a positive.
Be sure that you remain focused on guiding and nurturing your child’s learning, however a more child-directed learning system can be greatly beneficial for laying the groundwork for your child to self educate into their older years.
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