Blog: Children should Love Learning!

While there are ample ways how learning can take place, young children learn best through some very specified ways. To better understand this, we first look at the research findings on how learning takes place. One such finding reveals 12 key features of how effective learning takes place.

While I would love to cover all 12 key features highlighted above, in today’s blog, I will focus only on active involvement. A simple glance at your child’s face and body language would reveal whether active involvement takes place at all. A child who is actively involved with his or her learning process would be engaged, interested, and occupied as opposed to a child who is feeling dreadful, bored, and lost.

And to put things into a better perspective can you imagine a young child, say two plus till about the age of seven or eight, can you imagine making his or her learning experience one that is completely distasteful?

Here is where we hit on the brakes and take a minute to look at how incorporating sensorial play would be an ideal and crucial component of your child’s learning journey!

Thanking the many pioneers of sensorial play, Jean Piaget, Maria Montessori and John Comenius and many others for leading the way, sensorial play or sensory play is commonly known as the play that engages one or more than one senses in a significant manner. Additionally, this form of play goes beyond our five senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch) and includes play that engages balance and movements.

As children develop and grow, their exploration journey using their senses provides a multitude of benefits such as building rich neural pathways in the brain, promoting the development of their fine motor skills, and many more. We love the amazing outcomes shown in the image below!

Additionally, children with sensory processing disorders, learning difficulties and special needs too can benefit from active learning, specifically sensorial play. The benefits of sensorial play are countless, and incorporating such an approach ought to be welcomed, supported and improved upon. While this method of learning is time-consuming and requires greater attention to detail in terms of preparation, the child truly engages in active learning and experiences a very distinct moment of learning that will allow the concepts to be internalized and stored within their brains.

The integration of messages picked up by the senses and the educational concepts embedded through sensorial play ultimately makes the learning process, enjoyable, allowing the child to lead and personalize their learning alongside equipped educators and peers.

“A child who is actively involved with his or her learning process would be engaged, interested, and occupied as opposed to a child who is feeling dreadful, bored, and lost.”

Therefore, we must strive to create and cultivate a new image for learning, an image that shows learning is absolutely fun and worth the time and effort, a learning process that is enriching and active.  

Children should love learning!

We must bring back creativity, we must allow fun and messiness and allow sensorial experiences to be an integral part of every child’s journey before and as they transit to penmanship. We must allow them to choose and have a voice to shape their own learning experiences.

And so, the question I ask you today, ponder, pause, and see: Are your kids learning the right way? And I hope you do whatever it takes to ensure that they are for that is what I am committed to doing!