The secret to making learning fun for students who hate studying

Not all children are academically inclined or studious enough to ace their exams. Our education system is overly dependent on the rote method, which requires retention and instant recall. Some street-smart children who might be good at math, mental calculations, and other life skills might lack verbal expression and communication skills and therefore fall short overall.

Then there are those with short attention spans or slow comprehension. Such children lag behind not just in the academic rat race but also in self-esteem. Early remedial teaching that includes creative memory-enhancing tools will go a long way toward giving these students the much-needed boost in their performance, scores, and confidence — all of which are so important in their formative years of formal education.

These children need constant tapping into their potential and personalised coaching by parents and tutors — ideally one-on-one initially, and later in small, manageable groups that foster a healthy competitive spirit and drive to fare better than others.

The methodology can be made more engaging by using creative visual-associative methods and expressive art forms, such as drama, song, recitation, and drawing. A discussion of the same, with a few apt examples, will shed more light on this.

1. Storytelling: Tiny tales woven around the course material help not only make it more interesting but also facilitate easier retention and recall. For instance, while teaching the skeletal system, ‘Femur is our tallest friend in Thailand’ sounds more interesting than — the thigh bone is called Femur and is the longest bone in our body: or likewise, ‘We need our wrist to turn the steering wheel to drive a car, and hence the wrist bone being car-friendly is called carpal’.

2. Drawing/doodling: Associative doodling or sketching while teaching is definitely effective, as illustrations and figures are remembered more than a multitude of words. Hindi was a totally new option as a third language for a student. He picked up the number of 10 birds in Hindi in less than 10 minutes, when his teacher used this art form while teaching them, like drawing the shape of a peacock with the letters M O R and that of the swan with the letters H A N S (both being the names of the respective birds in Hindi). He will probably remember them for the rest of his life. 

3. Dramatics: A little drama with actions or recitation while learning long answers eases memorising and recall. Adding a rhyme scheme and/or setting a complicated answer/lesson to tune introduces an element of fun to the whole teaching and learning process. Innovative teachers have effectively used this format to even teach algebraic and chemical formulae.

4. Forming codes: a code with the first letters of multiple points or key words in any subject has proved to be helpful; the most common example of this being the one formed to remember the names and order of the planets: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles; where the first letter of each word in the sentence stands for Mercury, Venus Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. 

5. Activities: For example, making small labels on sticky pads with the names
of different bones in our body or parts of a plant, and asking the students to stick these in the right place on their own bodies or on plants or cut-outs of either; such activities make learning an enjoyable experience that aids long-term memory.  

6. Audio aids: Recordings of answers read aloud clearly, either by the teacher or by the students themselves, with repeated listening to these recordings that builds familiarity and accelerates learning.

Mathematics, of course, can be improved only by working out a daily dose of sums — the more, the better. A regular check on the consistency of their work should take care of this subject, and the many tools available to teach calculating mentally make it really easy to score in this subject.

Teachers can ensure that students enjoy the entire learning process and do not stress themselves. A little individual attention to such students, helping them understand basic and complex concepts, will ease the challenges they face while studying their extensive portions. These methods work and can do wonders, mostly at the primary — grassroots level and the middle school stage, by which time the foundation is strong enough to enable students to tackle higher classes head-on.