PK through kindergarten
You cultivate your child’s love of learning by sharing observations and insights in everyday situations, connecting new information to what your child already knows, bringing emotion into learning, and standing alongside your child as a fellow learner.
“It is literally…impossible to build memories, engage complex thoughts, or make meaningful decisions without emotion.”
— Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Ph.D.
Key Strategies
- Connect new information to facts and ideas that your child already knows. Think of your child’s brain as a spider web with facts like the nodes of the web. A spider web is strongest when there are a lot of threads radiating out in different directions. Similarly, understanding grows when there are lots of connections among facts and ideas.
- Bring emotion into the equation as you introduce and discuss new information. Your child is far more likely to fall in love learning if they regularly experience surprise, disgust, amazement, delight, and other powerful emotions as they learn.
- Stand alongside your child as a learner, not a teacher, as together you delight in discovering and describing the world. This is the best way to stimulate their curiosity and ownership of learning, even if it also means that they carry more misconceptions and make more mistakes in the short term.
Additional Resources
Book: The Gardener and the Carpenter, Alison Gopnik
Book: Emotions, Learning, and the Brain, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Learning Banter