Turning the Environment into Your Child's Classroom

I truly believe in engaging the environment in teaching children. Learning becomes fun, informal and meaningful when you turn your surrounding into your child's classroom. It also provides opportunities for learning at any given times, even unexpectedly. Here's my experience of how I have used the environment to teach my son. My son loves cars and I took that interest and turned it into an exciting learning experience. I taught him the concept of colours by pointing out the colour of cars around us. I started with blue and pointed at every blue car and said "that's a blue car", and I did that every time I saw a blue car. The next day, I asked him to point at any blue car if he sees one. Then, i went to red cars and every time he mastered, i taught him a new colour. It was simply amazing. He could tell all the colours up to silver when he was 2 years old. I have also used the same technique to teach shapes and many other things.

I make it a point to talk to him just about anything around us. The environment is a wonderful classroom that provides you with abundance of opportunities to teach your child something new every time. With this, you do not need to allocate a specific time for learning. Learning becomes natural and takes place almost all the time. Just describing what you are doing already provides a lot of room for learning.

Here are some suggestions you can try:

1. Take your children to the supermarket, tell them the names of vegetables and other food items. This will surely be more interesting than just hanging a poster of fruits and vegetables in their room.

2. Make them read car registration numbers to you to help reinforce mastery of numbers and alphabet.

3. Teach the concept of numbers by making them count items whenever you encounter a situation that permits, such as counting slices of cake on a plate while having tea. Or during morning walks collect dried leaves and count them as you and your child pick them up.

There are many more things you can do with your children that without you realising it, they're actually learning new stuff. It is crucial that we make learning enjoyable and fun for children and when learning becomes natural where it takes place anywhere, anytime, children will develop curiosity to almost everything around them and it is this thirst for knowledge that you want to develop in children.