Responding to ‘I hate learning’ from a 4 year old
My thoughts on how to help a 4 year old love learning.
I remember my daughter shouting ‘I hate learning’. She was only 4 at the time and had just started reception class at a local south London school. I took the statement with a pinch of salt, she had just had gone through a large life change (shifting from nursery to school) so there was a lot bundled into the statement. But it did get me thinking… dislike of schoolroom education is hardly a new feeling. But why do so many kids feel this way?
I confess that I didn’t enjoy school. But I do love learning. Kids love learning. My daughter loves learning. I had seen her tell me with pride about all the things she’d learnt. So what had gone wrong? What was it that she was really objecting to?
Why she didn’t like ‘learning’
After discussing it with her, part of the dislike came from the fact that she was struggling. She found it hard. It was new to her, she was young for her school year. And to top it off, her friends were much better at it than she was. That made complete sense to me. I don’t know anyone that likes being in that position. I enjoyed learning most when it was on my own terms, in things that I was interested in. And, importantly, learning in a process that didn’t include peer benchmarking and the fear of social embarrassment that came with it. School can be brutal when it comes to peer comparison. By definition, 50% of people are below average. I’m not sure if knowing that you’re in the bottom half helps you learn.
I wanted to see if I could make the process of learning fun again for my daughter. To do it in an environment without the immediate peer comparisons. To encourage
Common home-schooling solutions
This is still a work in progress (and I’d love new ideas). I tried a number of things:
- physical (card and wooden) puzzles: These were ok up to a point. But it was going to be expensive if every educational concept needed to be made out of wood
- exercise books: These were better than the puzzles — more diversity of topics but they needed a lot of input from me to get her started on them (their’s no feedback or interactivity — in a digital age I think we can do better)
- educational TV and youTube: This was by far the most engaging medium but lacked interactivity. It was easy to let the lessons wash over you without taking much understanding away.
- digital educational games: These were the best. They combined engagement with interactivity. But it took a long time to find good games. There were loads of ‘Math Games’ sites but the actual games they offered had virtually nothing to do with learning math.
My eventual solution…
In the end, I got fed up trawling poor quality websites and apps looking for teaching solutions. They were typically very poor quality. Even the school recommended tools were hard to use and old fashioned.
So I decided to give creating the games a go myself. I created this website for online math games: https://wideawakepip.com/math-games
I’d previously created a storybook app for young children (<5 years old) to help with speech and storytelling (here: https://wideawakepip.com) so had a ready made platform of sorts.
At the moment (in the midst of the Corona virus, Jan 2021) they are just experimental ideas but if people like them, I’ll keep adding and improving them. I’d love to know any feature requests and thoughts.
