Nowadays, more classrooms are using interactive learning to enhance kids’ learning experience. But what is interactive learning exactly – and why should parents take note of it? Interactive learning, at its core, are learning methods that strive to get children to participate more in class. In other words, techniques that focus on kids doing active learning. The goal of interactive learning is to have your child so invested, they wouldn’t even think to sleep through the lesson. Interactive learning can be done through various classroom activities. From lively class discussions to online learning games, there are many resources teachers can use to increase your child’s participation in class.
In this article, we’ll discuss 5 benefits of interactive learning for kids and why it’s important to incorporate it in children’s learning environment. After reading this, parents will be more motivated to include interactive learning in their homes as well!
1) Keeps children constantly thinking
While children can have an abundance of curiosity, it’s also a fact that they get bored pretty easily. With traditional learning methods, where students simply hear out the teacher’s explanations, their brains don’t get stimulated enough for them to pay attention to the lesson. So when you see your child sleeping in class, it’s not necessarily their fault.
But with interactive learning, children are kept on their toes! Either when the teacher can randomly call students out to answer a question, or when there’s a prize for students who solve the quiz correctly. Children become more motivated to keep their brains up and running throughout class. They don’t let kids lower their guard while in class, and they make it so that kids don’t mind being active. Interactive learning allows children to continuously stimulate their brain throughout the lesson, not giving them a chance to be bored at all!
2) Lets them practice important life skills
When kids actively participate in class, they enhance a lot of valuable skills along the way. For instance, solving problems by role playing in real world scenarios allows children to utilise their critical thinking skills and problem solving skills. These skills are incredibly important both inside and outside the classroom. And with creative interactive learning methods, children get to utilise these skills more often! Not only that, but children can also improve on their teamwork and collaboration skills! If you have trouble picturing this in your head, imagine the teacher arranging the students into small groups and using an online quiz to test their knowledge.
They then announce that whoever can reach the most points gets a reward. By working together as a group, and with the motivation of becoming first place, children can work together to the best of their abilities to deepen their understanding.
3) Motivates them to pay attention in class
When children get bored or lose interest in class, they end up hardly paying any attention to the lesson. This leads to them being behind on class material and needing more revisions or personal study time to catch up with what they missed. But with interactive learning, children are motivated to keep paying attention! The creativity and flexibility of interactive learning allows teachers to have multiple options of increasing student engagement. For instance, they can use an online learning platform to keep students active in class.
Some platforms, such as Practicle, even offer fun and challenging quests to hold students’ attention while teaching them at the same time. Interactive learning often comes with an incentive to motivate students to participate in class. Whether it’s a physical prize or a level up in a game, it’s easy to incorporate those into children’s learning to make them pay attention to class.
4) Allows them to absorb more of the material
As we mentioned earlier, it’s easy for kids to get bored. And when they do, sometimes the lesson just goes over their heads. But when children do pay attention, their learning process improves much more than it would’ve otherwise!
When students learn actively in class, the material they’re learning more often than not actually stays in their head. This also comes hand in hand with their motivation to be active in class. Try and take a guess on which scenario kids will remember better: a standard classroom lecture or a group battle to get the most right answers? Probably the latter, because it’s more interesting for them. And a more interesting class means they paid better attention and they remembered the class topic much better. Research has also found that engaging students in class allows them to improve their academic performance.
5) Makes learning more fun!
Finally, the best thing about interactive learning is that it allows children to have fun in class! Think about it. The reason why kids don’t pay attention or get bored in the first place is because they think that class itself is boring. But what happens when you include interactive based learning to the mix? What do you think will happen if you include fun games or exciting role playing or online tools while learning? Well, class just got much more fun and memorable for them.
Remember, at the end of the day, kids are kids. You can’t fault them for being bored in class when they’re known to have pretty short attention spans. So, the trick is to get their attention, keep their attention, and maintain it for the rest of the school year. By using fun interactive learning methods, kids will remember the class much more fondly and they will be more motivated to learn in that class in the future!
Start interactive learning with Practicle!
Interactive learning provides a lot of positive effects and benefits for children. By using this method early on, children will see studying in a new light and will look forward to it much more often! But interactive learning doesn’t just happen in school, you can also conduct it in your homes as well! For example, you can start your child’s interactive learning using Practicle, an online math game for primary school children.
The app’s fun quests, personalized quizzes, and 24/7 accessibility will give your child a taste of how fun interactive learning can be! Witness the game’s effectiveness yourself with our 7-day free trial today!