by Nick Frontera

Created on: July 04, 2009   Last Updated: July 22, 2009

Education is the single most important thing that should be installed in every child's head, starting even from an early age. A child's life should be balanced a certain way: fun and the installation of good learning habits. Fun is always good for kids; they need it and is essential. But in today's day and age, it seems as if more and more kids are rotting their brains away with video games and television shows with inappropriate innuendos. Why not do something that's educational and incorporate the one thing that's always on kids' minds: fun. Be involved in what your child is learning and keep tabs with the teacher. And anyway, elementary education can't be too hard for parents to keep track of and remember. For example, make a game out of studying. If your child has spelling words, host a mini spelling bee between the child and peers, include prizes and modifications to the game to keep them wanting to play. Then when a spelling test comes up, they know how to spell the words and they didn't even mean for it to happen. This in turn will be good for the child for future years when secondary school comes around. They'll be so used to doing activities like this it'll be natural to them and they'll continue on with it. Eventually, it'll reach the point where that child, now teenager, understands the importance of studying, all because you installed it at an early age.

Another thing to do, which I have found easy, is make it active. Kids are jumpy and love to run around. A fun one I do with kids is really popular. You put a whole bunch of numbers on the wall, ranging from 1 to 100. You can use any function of math, such addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. You can say, for example, two times six, and the kids search for the number twelve and they have to hit it. By listening to the math problem and watching other kids hit the answers, the kids are learning regardless if they know the answer or not, just by watching the correct answer.

Make special sure that you keep every kid involved. When picking up your kid, talk to other parents and make a "study" date. The kids will just think they're playing. Then when they get to school the next day, they're so full of knowledge. It really works because when I was a kid, my mom did this all the time. Multiplication came so easy to the kids, the teacher had no choice but to move on to division, and even more complicated spelling words.

Keep it to the curriculum of the school, keep it fun, but mainly just keep it. Make it so what you do at home corresponds to their school work, and with having fun, they'll be learning- and not even meaning to.

Learn more about this author, Nick Frontera.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.