The Perfect Way to Learn

Your child’s big, beautiful, squishy brain is their most powerful and versatile tool, which can help them achieve pretty much anything they like in life, if only they learn how to use it properly.

🗝 Key points:

• Make it fun
• Make it relevant
• Keep it flexible, and don't force it
• Practise, practise, practise

So immensely, ridiculously complex is that squidgy bundle of neurons between their ears, with so many trillions of connections continually forming and ‘pruning’, that it’s unclear whether as a species we’re actually intelligent enough to figure out exactly how it works, which is rather ironic when you think about it…

The key point is, your child has an almost infinite ability to learn new information. We don’t know what the maximum storage capacity of a human memory is because we haven’t yet found the limit. So next time you’re wondering whether they’ll ever ‘get the hang’ of this, remember that they can in fact learn it all, the trick lies in figuring out how.

So what’s the best way to go about it?

Try this little game:

“Close your eyes, and out loud, describe exactly how to get from where you are sitting right now, to the sink in the kitchen, pour a glass of water, and return back to your chair”

The aim of the game is to describe everything you can think of in as much detail as possible.

• What colour are the walls? The carpet? The curtains?
• How many stairs are there down to the kitchen?
• Where in the room is the sink?
• What type of tap do you have?
• Where are the glasses kept? Are they upside down or the right way up in the cupboard?
• What’s the biggest room you pass through on your journey?
• Where’s that one creaky floorboard that you need to avoid to prevent waking everyone up at night?
• What type of floor do you have in your kitchen?

This seems like a strange exercise, but I’m pretty sure you’re able to effortlessly answer almost every single one of the questions above (the ones that are applicable to your individual chair-to-sink journey that is) without thinking particularly hard right?

Now stop to consider for a moment what you have just done.

You have recalled from memory an enormous amount of detailed information – colours, directions, numbers, dimensions, characteristics – without even trying. You just knew it.

At no point during the last few months or years did you sit down and think, “I’m going to learn everything I can about the journey from my room to the sink in the kitchen”, and yet here you are giving a perfect recital. Why?

Because you’ve lived it, hundreds of times.

That’s how your brain learns best, by immersing itself, by living the information. You don’t consciously try to learn it, you just do, because that’s literally what your brain does. It experiences the same information over and over, time and time again until an association is drawn, and that information is deemed important enough to commit to long term memory, and so it sticks.

The feel of the carpet, the smell of the new paint, the sound of the birds outside the bathroom window, the taste of the coffee – all of your senses contribute to your brain’s interpretation of the world around it, and therefore your memory.

Why is studying so inefficient?

It should be pretty clear by now that your child’s brain likes to receive lots of different types of information, over and over and in different formats, in order to truly digest and understand the hugely complex world around it.

It also shows you why ‘studying’, is so inefficient.

By sitting at a desk and reading brand new, contextually irrelevant and exclusively visual information, it’s going to be pretty hard to convince their poor brain that it’s important enough to use up valuable space in their long term memory.

Don’t believe me?

Try this – I’ll tell you my journey to the sink, and you try and remember it just by sitting and reading the information:

Stand up from your five-wheeled desk chair at your wobbly wooden desk that has a five of spades playing card folded up and jammed under the right back leg to keep it steady.

Walk past the chest of drawers with five drawers, the bottom one of which squeaks unless you pull it out really fast, and go through your white bedroom door whose handle doesn’t work unless you turn it the wrong way.

Walk along the green-carpeted hallway with cobwebs in the top corner because nobody can reach them and the duster’s handle broke last month, avoiding the creaky floorboard about a foot’s width in from the banister just before you get to the bathroom.

Step over the ethernet cable that Dad put in last week because the WiFi stopped working after that rickety dead tree came down when the brown mercedes reversed into it, and walk down the fifteen steps, being careful to stand on the left hand side to prevent them creaking….

See?

I didn’t ‘try’ to learn this information, nor did I have to think for a second before I could reel it off from memory, but if you were to sit and try and memorise it by studying, it would be pretty hard work to learn.

So what’s the best way to learn?

Allow your child’s brain to ‘live‘ the information, and use the skills, that it needs to learn, by interacting and immersing it in the relevant scenarios with information from as many senses as possible, as often as possible. By actually experiencing the situation in which the knowledge is relevant and useful, the brain automatically realises that it is high-yield, useful knowledge and holds onto it.

An example

Option 1:
– Sitting at the back of a stuffy classroom, surrounded by other children equally uninterested in listening to the stranger at the front of the room try to explain the fact that in order for fire to exist, it requires oxygen, heat and fuel, plus a source of ignition. The children are then given homework to complete in their own time, including the questions “What four things are required for fire to exist?”

Option 2:
– A visit to our favourite picnic spot in the woods, where we (with the farmer’s permission) set up a little bonfire to toast some marshmallows.

We’ve brought some firelighters and screwed up newspaper and a flint-and-steel igniter, and we set about building a little pile of sticks and dried leaves in a safe, clear area surrounded by wet grass and no overhanging trees.

We struggle to get the fire to light at first because there is no wind and the fire isn’t ventilated properly, but we find that by gently blowing on the embers, we can encourage it into a sturdy little flame, and enjoy finding other dry sticks to keep it going.

Our three year old asks why daddy blew on the fire, and to which I reply that it pushes more oxygen from the air towards the flame, allowing it to burn the paper and sticks, which are the fuel.

I then ask him what he thinks the flint-and-steel is for, which he ponders for a while before suggesting, “To start it?”
“Exactly!” I reply, and explain that this is called ignition.

We then repeat a couple of times, that for the fire to work, we need fuel, oxygen, heat and a source of ignition.

This is where homeschooling comes into its own. It is vastly more effort on the part of the adult, because there is so much more set up and time investment required to ‘learn’ a specific piece of information, but consider what else the child learns along the way

• Uses of fire as a heat source, a light source, and to cook food
• Fire safety and the risks
• The concept of needing landowner permission for camping and bonfires
• Persistence and trying new techniques if it's not working to start with

But more arguably importantly for the child:

• My parent is interested in teaching me

Learning through games

Why are kids are great at video games?

• Because it’s fun
• They’re actively invested in it
• They’re immersed in it
• They're using sight, sound and tactile feedback via the controller
• They want to find out what happens next

In short, games are the best way to learn, so we play as many games as we possibly can. It does not matter the format - board games, apps, video games, silly-made-up-running-around games.

Just make it a game, and the learning will follow.

Drawing associations

The brain literally learns by drawing associations, so we encourage this by talking about ‘related’ topics to whatever we’re doing in the present moment. This can be as loose as you like, and not even that relevant, the point is you’re encouraging their furiously developing brain to think laterally and draw associations between things they may not otherwise have considered together.

• Eg we're at the zoo, looking at the clouded leopard
• The name for clouded leopard is neofelis nebulosa
• The word nebula means cloud of gas in space
• Then we start talking about the Crab Nebula that we saw at the science museum last week...

Practice, practice, practice

Finally - reading, writing and maths needs consistent, regular exercising like a muscle.

Not for long, just enough to engage the mind without leading to boredom, and this can vary day to day – 20 mins today may be followed by 5 tomorrow, depending on mood and current energy levels.

That’s another beautify of homeschool – the inherent flexibility to follow your child’s lead and adapt to what they want to learn about.