The Best Ways To Educate Children

Providing access to a high-quality education is one of your responsibilities as a parent. You likely researched schools to make sure your child attends a school that allows her to be successful and enjoy learning. There are many approaches to educating children but there are commonalities among all of these approaches that can maximize the educational opportunities that your child receives.

Read to Them

Books are the pathway to new worlds, new ideas and new discoveries. Reading to children is one of the most important ways to build literacy skills and expose them to new things. Reading aloud to children captivates their attention and builds interest in many different topics. As your child becomes engaged in the story or the information in the book, she will build her vocabulary, literacy and comprehension skills, according to Scholastic. Reading out loud requires your child to use her imagination as she grasps new concepts and learns to understand new ideas. The best educational environments make constant use of a wide variety of different books.

Experiment With Them

Hands-on learning is one of the most important ways to encourage retention and build interest and curiosity. Engaging in experiments, such as science experiments, teaches your child to be observant, make connections between new information and information he already knows and to build interest in learning more. The best educational environments teach children observation skills and allow them to experiment with what they notice. Effective schools encourage connection building by asking your child to share her discoveries and by allowing her to seek additional ways to satisfy her curiosity, says Scholastic.

Assess Them

Regular assessments ensure that your child is making adequate academic progress. Assessments analyze your child's school work to make sure she is able to show what she has learned in the classroom. John Gardner, author of "Assessment and Learning," suggests that there are many informal and formal ways to assess students. The best educational environments rely on both formal and informal assessments. Formal assessments include standardized tests and final exams, while informal assessments include teacher observations and grades on homework assignments. Assessments are critical, reports Gardner, because they allow your child's teacher to identify what your child already knows and what she needs additional practice with.

Consider Their Individual Needs

According to Amy Benjamin, author of "Differentiated Instruction: A Guide for Elementary School Teachers," differentiated instruction is the practice of considering the different learning needs of each individual student. The best schools include a variety of different learning styles in the classroom in order to ensure that your child learns the material in the most effective way for her. Teachers can rely on current academic standards to create many different approaches to teaching one subject. In a differentiated classroom, your child will be exposed to teacher guided instruction, hands-on activities, group work and a variety of educational resources.

http://www.livestrong.com/article/167128-the-best-ways-to-educate-children/