When you are helping your children to learn, the moral of the tale is to get them laughing, telling jokes, having fun, and that way your children will more easily succeed in their learning and at school.

Happy children are motivated, stressed children do not want to learn.

So how can you help your children with their learning and give them a good time and make it fun?

Essentially we suggest that you as the parent take part in collaborative learning with your children, having a lot of fun whilst doing so.

On our Blogs you will find tips, techniques, and methods of how to do this to help you greatly improve your children’s abilities and learning.

The children who have teachers, who are happy, funny, smile, grin and who love their work, do much better than children who do not have such wonderful teachers.Are you really surprised? No? I thought not,and nor were we when we read about this.The question that arises is this.

Is there a lesson in this for parents?

Well, the advice to teachers prior to teaching is therefore to get in a good mood,de-stress, and be prepared to use material that is humorous and fun, that way their students are more likely to do better.

So what lesson is there from the world of teaching for you parents?

Yes, you’ve got it! When you are helping your children to learn, do it in a fun and happy way and your children will do a lot better.

So, as is said in my home country, England, “have a laugh”. Have a laugh with your children and get involved with their activities.

At ‘The Learning Well’ we say something similar – “make it fun, then you’ve won”.

Nature magazine published this conclusion as far back as 1983 stating that REM sleep was required to enable the brain to process the information and the experiences of the day.

Without this sleep the brain was unable to delete superfluous information and pathways and would therefore be less capable of remembering and learning.

This is a very important message for the quality of children’s learning. What about during vacations and holiday times?

The obvious thing to do to give your children the best chance when learning, is to make sure that they get plenty of sleep and this means during vacation and holiday times as well.

During vacation and holiday periods the temptation is to let the kids stay up late and the pressure from the kids themselves to stay up late is there as well.

However, these times away from school are great opportunities for learning whilst at the same time having a lot of fun doing so. 

To give the best chance of learning during vacations; the thing to do is therefore to have them go to bed at their normal school bed time.

I’ll bet that if they do, your kids will be set up for the day and more likely to learn well. Of course on some occasions it’s great to have them stay up late, why not let both them and you have a treat sometimes.

This suggests that for learners the best time of the day may vary depending on the person and that effective learning for an individual will vary accordingly.

But what does the research say about the best time of the day for learning? Some research says that we learn better at different times of the day. For example, R Thayer suggests that effective learning is best carried out in the late morning and early evening. As a parent need you concern yourself with this?

Well, as a parent working with your children and helping them with their learning this is something to bear in mind. Our advice is to see and hear at what time in the day your children perform best at their learning and try to fit in with this to get the best effort from them. This will lead to better and more effective learning.

The time of day factor is something that parents need to be particularly aware of during vacation and holidays from school. Do your children learn best in the late morning and early evening as Thayer suggests or at some other time? What does your research with your children conclude?  When in the day does your children’s effective learning occur?

The thing is to – “do what works”.

Whatever time of day is best for your children make it fun and they are much more likely to be motivated and to retain what they have learned and to undertake real and effective learning.

To say this in another way; when teachers expect children to do well in school that is what they do and when teachers do not expect them to do well they do not do so well.

This is a type of self-fulfilling prophecy and is known as the ‘Pygmalion Effect’.

In the world of education the effect was discovered by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson and set out in their book ‘Pygmalion in the classroom’.

In their study teachers were told that a class had very intelligent students and that the teachers had to make sure that they were stretched. Though these were ‘ordinary’ school students they achieved brilliant results.

Why?

Because these school students came to believe that they were the best and this belief motivated them to achieve at a higher level.

Anthony Robbins says that “what we consider possible or impossible is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.”

If you believe you are something you will take action on that belief.

If you believe you are a dancer, not just that you can dance, then you will dance. If you believe that you are a mountaineer you will take action and climb mountains.

If a child believes “I am intelligent and good at schoolwork” then he or she will do far, far, better at school.

So, does this have a lesson for you as a parent concerned over your child’s education? We think it does.

If you have high expectations of your children then they will do better in school work.

If you give your child the belief that they are intelligent then they will absorb this belief and act accordingly. How can you do this in a practical sense?

Rather than intelligence being narrowly defined as it used to be, intelligence is now viewed as being the product of multiple intelligences.

If your child is not so great at written work, are they better at speaking, do they come up with fantastically creative stories? Praise them and tell them that they are intelligent. Are they not so good at maths at school but good at singing, clapping, playing an instrument? Praise them and tell them that they are intelligent.

The spin off will be that your child will believe that they are intelligent, it will become part of who they believe they are and they will act accordingly and you will find that this belief has a positive impact on those areas of your child’s school work that they may not doing as well as they could be.

Your child’s belief that they are intelligent will raise their performance in all areas of school life as they act on that belief.