Ask a student what their favourite subject is, or better yet, what their favourite activity is, and you'll get a variety of answers. Maybe they like learning art or sports, or maybe they can’t wait to hang out with their friends or go to the cottage with their family. Some kids might like reading or math, but there’s no doubt that you'll get an answer that centres around what that child finds is fun.
Why is fun so important for kids? For one thing, as any parent, educator, or childcare provider knows, a fun activity engages kids’ attention and helps them invest in the task at hand. But on a more fundamental level, there's a reason that fun creates a sense of investment. Fun gives kids a sense of play-acting what it means to be a grown up. Fun activities feel important and purposeful, and give kids the sense that they have some control over their environment and the outcomes of their actions.
When adults choose to learn or refine a skill, we typically have an end-goal in mind—something we want to use the skill for. We feel purpose in our learning because we can project the benefits that the new skill will provide us. For kids, game play that utilizes their developing skills and knowledge helps to solidly that purposeful sense of application that adults can sometimes take for granted. That’s why we at Mentorhood love infusing learning with fun, because kids take a lot more ownership over material that they find exciting.
How Do We Make Learning Fun?
There are two main channels down which educators can pour fun. We can make traditional learning environments more fun places to be, or we can facilitate activities that directly involve play, such as games and competitions. We strongly believe in both.
Straight-Up Learning, Made Fun
In the first case, we can make the curriculum-based learning process fun by imparting joy into the process, and we can do this in several different ways. One of the primary ways we do this is by making the whole educational interaction warm and friendly. This starts with a responsibility on the teacher to create a lively, warm, and safe space where kids can feel that they are being instructed with kindness and listened to. Kids should feel that they can learn at their own pace, ask questions, and have their confusion clarified. This makes the encounter more enticing overall.
A compounding benefit of a positive environment, in classes with multiple children, is that as each child responds to the constructive environment positively, they then begin to feed off of each other’s positive energy. This can be a great way to add more joy and friendliness to the process. Kids love making friends, they love to learn with other kids who are enthusiastic. The teacher creates and facilitates the environment, and the children can then reinforce it.
On a further note, this idea that kids feed off of each other’s energy is also the reason we cap our online group classes at five students. With small enough classes, students get all the benefits of feeling like they can get to know their classmates and participate in an enthusiastic group activity, while still getting enough time to participate in the lessons. Beyond five students, classes can become more impersonal rather than the opposite, because the number of students can take away from each person‘s room to engage with the class. We’ve optimized our classes maximum at the five student level in order to get the best of both worlds.
High Stakes, Wide Smiles
There is great joy in experiencing a sense of accomplishment. If you think back to your most joyful times and the times when you’ve were having the most fun, likely you were doing an activity that involved a challenge, at least in part. Humans thrive on applying themselves to challenging tasks and seeing things get done. We love moving mountains, however small they may be.
In our classes, we focus on questions with different levels of challenge so that we can truly optimize our approach to each day’s lesson. We are able to work on problems that are challenging and approachable for both the group as a whole as well as for the individual student. Having small classes and varied material allows teachers to interact with every student personally in order to address knowledge gaps and give material tailor-challenged to that student’s level. This creates a sense of mastery as each student has the chance to conquer the material they are learning.
Keep It Moving
We typically have more material than we can cover in a class, and this allows us to adjust what we choose to teach on the fly in response to the energy and skills in the room. Teachers have discretion to move past topics more quickly if they have been well-mastered by the students, or to spend a little more time on topics that need a bit more work. This allows our lessons to continually focus on topics that are interesting, approachable, and optimally constructive for skill-building. We believe in empowering our teachers to be adaptive so that every educational encounter can maintain that sense of challenge and accomplishment.
A Foundation of Fun
We’re passionate about successful education that imparts mastery and confidence in our students. We strive to create a fun environment that allows kids to feel confident about topics that are sometimes seen as intimidating. From the most curriculum-focused classes, we work with passionate educators who are skilled in creating fun, positive environments so that every child logs out of math class feeling better than they did before.
Next time, we’ll look at where math meets games and all the benefits that result from play-based learning.
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