Motivation also plays a key role in a child’s learning process. The definition of motivation is force, stimulus, or influence. What motivates our children to learn? I believe this takes a lot of different ingredients. A key factor is the ability to work against discouragement and to keep on going. Keeping motivation going, is keeping the excitement going and getting our children to say, “I want to learn more about this” or “I want to be better at this”. A good example of this might be grandparents, aunts, and uncles telling stories on what excites them or even a neighbor, who loves carpentry. I believe learning is at the heart of motivation and the majority of the time we our moving too fast to even recognize it. Another ingredient is effort; your children view their surroundings and how parents make an effort. Your children will notice that you are making an effort and think, that it can’t be too unpleasant. Next is confidence, without confidence there will be no effort or motivation, so confidence is very, very important. The definition of self-confidence is confidence in oneself and in one's powers and abilities. By all means, building self-confidence is a long process. According to Michael D. Whitley, Ph.D., parents will need skills in empathy, compassion, and patience: an ability to listen intently for what a child says and what a child leaves unsaid; an ability to be persistent over time and follow through even when angry or discouraged. It requires a capacity to sustain the search for truth and honesty in relationships. In addition, it requires a passionate capacity to sustain love for someone who may be angry, rejecting, and resentful when you are being understanding and rational. (XV, XVI) As you can see, this is not an easy task and will not be a hop, skip, and a jump to achieve.
Is it better for a child to only practice grammar? The definition of grammar is the study of words, their function, meaning and relation in a sentence. Basically, rules that governs the English language. According to Benjamin Ludwig, building a strong foundation is a good beginning for your child to succeed and to become an excellent communicator. In addition, having the ability to understand and compose a given piece of writing. Knowing the basics, what is a noun, a verb, an adjective, and an adverb can get them started. Of course, as the child gets older, different items can be added, such as, the six basic sentence structures. These include: subject and verb; subject, verb and predicate nominative; subject, verb and predicate adjective; subject, verb and direct object; subject, verb, indirect object and direct object; and subject, verb, direct object and object compliment. Of course, this takes years of practice in school and out. This goes back to drilling and testing your skills. This can play an important part in building and giving your child the academic edge. Even though there is no evidence that learning grammar will make your child a better reader or writer, understanding grammar will improve your child’s comprehension of the world and how it operates.
Can a student just learn from his or her own writing? According to Constance Weaver, grammar exercises will not guarantee an improvement in a student’s writing. In addition, grammar should be integrated with student’s writing and not memorization of grammatical elements. She believes grammar should be taught in mini lessons as you go and not focused on formal classes of just grammar and memorization at an early age. But as a parent, reading can start the development of an average child in grammar by sight. The more you read to a child, the more he or she will become accustomed to the simple sentence structures. In addition, the sight of different words, such as nouns and verbs can come with time. All parents want their child to succeed and be prepared for the many challenges in life. This is being done in many ways, from reading to computers games, and even tutoring before they enter formal schooling. But of course, every child does not have all these advances. A good portion of children have difficulty just attending school.
It is not that the child does not want to learn; it’s the availability and support of parents and guardians. This can be a major hurdle in the child’s life. So, please keep in mind that every child is different and learns differently. A good example of this is myself. As a child, reading was not an everyday activity in my parent’s home. Unfortunaly, as a child, my parents relied on the school system for my education, so my lessons started at a later date than normal. The school emphasized the whole-language approach to reading, which stresses story context and word recognition. No phonics were used, which is breaking down words and making the word by sounding them out. In addition, I did not have a strong foundation of grammar. Along the way, I learned some basics, but by 6th grade I was in trouble with grammar, spelling, and reading. I could not learn from my own writing, which the teacher instructed me to do because of not being able to put a simple paragraph together. At that point, I attended a special class for grammar, writing and spelling. This class was known as the dumb class, which caused another problem. In this class, we started from the beginning and started to learn more about grammar in general, such as simple sentence structure, in addition, to learning and memorizing the skills in grammar. This did help, however, there was so much more to learn. But, I had improved my ability to write and understand a paragraph that was written by myself. I believe, this has caused a struggle my whole life with reading, writing, grammar, and spelling. Again, every child is different. But my beliefs are from my experience, not experiments of other children and documented research. As a parent today, I have done the total opposite of my parents, with the help of my husband and with teachers in the Twinsburg school system.
All in all, the parents of today need to be prepared, motivated, and of course; confident to help their children succeed. Learning is different for each and every child but reading, and more reading to children at an early age can give them a head start in school. So learning grammar for one child might be different than another. As you can see, giving each child the individual attention he or she needs will determine which way is best in developing grammar as a parent. Of course, one method might work on one child and not the other; a combination of different methods might be the solution.
