Making It Easy for Your Child to Learn

Teaching Your Child How to Learn

As we go through life, we continuously learn from the experiences that shape the way we perceive and interact with the world. Does your child have what it takes to learn the lessons that life offers? Be it learning on putting one’s shoe, participating well in school tasks or even interacting with other people.

Pre-learning skills are pre-requisite skills that act as scaffolds in order for more complex and higher-cognitive processes to take place. Imagine a kid inside a classroom who doesn’t pay attention when the teacher is talking, who is unable to sit down during coloring or note-copying tasks, who gets easily frustrated with even the slightest hint of challenge or a change in one’s routine- there’s not much learning happening, really. Being inside the classroom with that kind of behavior? It’s a waste of everyone’s precious resources- money, energy and especially time.

The following skills are important if you want to maximize your child’s learning to achieve her or his full potential. Most of the names are easy to understand because the term for the skill already explains itself!

The first is response to name-calling which is the skill that enables the client to look at someone when she or he is called.

The second is eye contact- which is the ability to look meaningful to another person’s eyes during social interactions.

The third to fifth skills are closely intertwined and is crucial if you are teaching various concepts or doing non-preferred tasks. As adults, we have learned that not everything that we do is what we prefer- sometimes we just have to or even need to; despite that, we still do it because we know that it’s important. For kids? They might not see it as important just yet.

The third and fourth skills are impulse control and frustration tolerance, which is the ability to delay gratifications to accomplish the task and to push through until the task is completed despite the presence of challenges or difficulties. These two are component skills that enable the executive function of goal-directed persistence to develop.

For the last one, we are looking at the child’s ability to follow instructions, consistently.

To sum it all up, the pre-learning skills include response to name-calling, eye contact, sitting tolerance, impulse control and frustration tolerance and lastly, the ability to follow instructions consistently. By developing these pre-learning skills, you can be assured that your child pays attention to what you, their parents, and life offers them.