Three years ago, when I started tutoring my daughter, I didn’t have a daily nor a weekly learning plan. I just had a toolbox of different activities to choose from depending on my kid’s mood. 

After a few months, I naturally transitioned to adopting daily and weekly routines instead. Basically, a primitive version of a weekly learning plan.

I transitioned because my 3 years old daughter liked it better to always know what we were about to do. I think having a daily learning plan also helps her feel secure, in control and more engaged. Additionally, she knows in advance how much effort is required and can mentally prepare accordingly. 

Another reason why I started building a weekly learning plan is because it is a practical way to consolidate all the learnings from countless hours of teaching. Things like how many activities, what type of activities, in which order, what difficulty level, where to practice and how long to practice are all embedded in my weekly learning plan. 

I constantly re-model and optimize the learning plan as kids develop to keep them engaged and always learning new things effectively.  

Find here 5 practical tips to build an effective weekly learning plan and an example of my 5 years old daughter current plan:

1. Start with a simple learning plan

2. Always have a plan B and plenty of extra time

3. Practice activities in the right order

4. Plan activities efficiently using different formats (group activities, private lessons, parent teaching…)

5. Keep fine-tuning the weekly plan

Reaching the autonomous practice or autonomous learning stage is our first goal because it helps kids train more and improve faster. If children enjoy practicing they will practice spontaneously, more frequently and more intensively. Simultaneously freeing up time and energy for other activities. 

While step 1: getting inspired and step 2: getting familiar each lasted one week, step 3, reaching autonomous learning, could last anything between 1 week and 2 years.

For example, it took almost 2 years for my daughter to become autonomous at reading books but now, at age of 5, when we go to the library she autonomously selects books and starts reading them. Instead it took her just a couple of weeks to become autonomous at climbing, similarly she starts climbing when we arrive at the gym and autonomously selects new challenging routes.  

How can we help children become autonomous as easily as possible?

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1. Don’t correct mistakes

It is counter intuitive but correcting mistakes is irritating, making children less likely to enjoy the practice and come back again spontaneously. But if we don’t correct mistakes how can they ever improve? In my experience children know when they are repeatedly making the same mistake and self-correct. We just need to be patient and wait for the self correcting process to happen. Sometimes we can speed it up by sporadically correct mistakes or by designing an exercise that makes the particular error more self-evident. 

For example, now that I am teaching piano to my daughter I prefer not to correct her. I don’t say anything about hands posture, rhythm and wrong notes. I am aware she knows when she makes multiple mistakes or when her hands are not moving efficiently. I know she is trying hard to do better and that’s enough for now. 

Different analogy, when people learn a new language they often make mistakes when talking. If the person they are speaking with cuts them off to correct every error they make, it becomes unproductive and discouraging for the learner who, most likely, will stop talking. Instead the learner only needs to be corrected sporadically, or not at all, and will improve by hearing other people talking anyway. This is how children learn their mother tongue.  

2. Identify the basic skills for autonomous learning

To do this I imagine myself busy with something and only able to give minimal guidance to my child to help him/her practice and learn something new about the specific activity or subject. What kind of instruction or support could I give him? Reading a book, running an experiment, teaching someone, practicing a drill, learning a new technique, writing something, filming something, inventing something, creating something… What kind of minimal skills does he/she needs to have acquired already?

It is true that in addition to basic skills it also takes willingness to practice and learn autonomously. But, in my experience, willingness automatically comes when children are confident they can improve autonomously. It is a self-reinforcing mechanism.

For example, as I write this article I identified four basic skills to autonomously learning piano. One, playing notes with all fingers and both hands coordinated together (hands); two, reading basic musical notation (eyes); three, keeping the tempo using a metronome and/or singing while playing (rhythm); four, playing a melody just heard a few times (ear). I will re-assess whether these are the right ones after testing them using the most simple exercise imaginable. Theoretically these should allow my daughter to play a new melody from a book or by hearing it and maybe, combined with basic music theory, allow her to compose a new melody.

3. Build a repertoire of favorite exercises and drills

Now we need to find or invent ultra simple exercises and materials to train those basic skills. The key to success is to start with the easiest difficulty level imaginable, train skills separately but also together. If our child doesn’t like the exercise it is probably too difficult already, it is better to change quickly or at least alter it to make it more appealing.

Training for autonomy often requires learning multiple skills at once resulting in slower visible improvements, ultimately reducing learner’s motivation. That’s were making practice more playful can help bridge the gap.

For example, beginners rarely play the piano with a metronome and sing notes and bits when they play. It requires a great deal of coordination but if we start with a single note and a slow tempo it becomes easy. Introducing these skills later, when the children already plays complicated melodies could be even more challenging.

At times we should also let children explore the activity freely and encourage them to repeat the things they do that help them acquire those basic skills needed for autonomous learning. We can also invent different variations of the exercises they create. This also helps children noticing the countless degrees of freedom they can play with.

For example, I saw my daughter naturally liked playing the first five notes of D major scale (C, D, E, F, G) on the piano using the 5 fingers of her right hand

(I don’t know if having this kind of finger strength and dexterity from day one is unusual but, if it is, I suspect she built it by climbing and playing with lego technic and lego dots since the age of 2. There are synergies in learning!).

So little by little I introduced her to different variations of this exercise, like: playing the same notes with her left hand, playing starting from other notes than C, playing ascending and descending, playing legato and staccato, playing the entire scale switching on 3rd finger, playing every other key of the scale to subtly introduce harmonics, etc. She now performs these exercises as warm-up routines before playing something from a colourful beginner’s book she likes and uses to work on musical notation. 

This was the last step of my playful learning guide but more tips on how to facilitate practice are coming, stay tuned.

Thanks for reading and let me know if you find it useful!

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We are going to spend another week getting them familiar with the activity first-hand. Ideally practicing daily even if for just 1 minute, which is still 100% better than nothing.

Some might argue I am going too slow but, in my experience, it is always better to take more time at the beginning to increase the chances that children will genuinely like the activity. This way they will become passionate, autonomous and will always have fun!

During step 2, bring your child in the setup you designed for practicing and let him/her free to explore the environment and the tools. 

The first objective is to let your child become familiar with the environment and the tools so he won’t be afraid when it is time to practice. 

Put the material for the activity in the center stage and let him discover it autonomously. If the first day he/she ignores it completely, try again the next day before starting altering the setup.  

For the very first time, the best moment of the day is soon after breakfast when they are fresh, active and curious.

The second objective is to notice if the setup you initially imagined needs to be modified. You can ask questions to your child (what he like, or don’t), rely on his/her favorite themes or search inspiration on the web.

For my daughter, having colourful stickers on the piano keys that she placed her-self was the game changer. For my son, having the piano opened and watching the hammers striking the chords made all the difference.

The third objective is to build your child’s confidence. He/she needs to experience the joy of feeling capable of practicing and able to improve.

For this you can use an ice breaker exercise. It has to be something short and simple, to give confidence to your child. If the exercise you imagined doesn’t work, change it quickly. Get inspired by things your child tries him-self. Also don’t forget to felicitate your child, highlighting how great he did. 

For introducing my kids to the piano, I found an exercise where they had to play the first two black keys (C# and D#) of different octaves. Unsurprisingly it didn’t work. My 2 years old boy preferred a different variation where he had to play the third white key of different octaves as the keys all had a yellow sticker, his favorite color. My 5 years old daughter preferred to follow a beginner’s book with colourful notes on the pentagram and always played the same note but with different durations (rhythm). Later she switched to playing all keys one by one with both hands.

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The bottom line is that learning can always be playful but it requires the tutor to actively observe the pupils and make changes to please them without sacrificing effectiveness too much. 

Stay tuned for step 3 coming next week!

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it!

Find something you would like your child to learn?

Perhaps something you think he/she will love for sure, or something you like and want to share a common interest, or something you want to learn together, or something complementary to what he/she is passionate about already, or something he/she doesn’t like at all but really needs it (reading, algebra, English…).

This week I have chosen to help Elisa, my 5 years old daughter, learn to play the piano. I have tried and failed many times already but she likes music and singing so much that I am sure she will love playing the piano, too. I just need to be methodical and find the right angle.

Step number 1: Getting inspired

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. William Butler Yeats

Together with your child search for the most inspiring videos, music, pictures and/or stories related to the skill to be learnt. A really good one should be enough.

Tip, narrow your search including his/her favorite things and themes: super heroes, princesses, robots, beautiful dresses, adventure stories, space exploration, unicorns, you know it!

Watch it together a few times a day for a whole week and each time discuss why he/she likes it so much.

For inspiring my daughter to learn to play the piano we searched on social media (youtube, instagram, tiktok) for her favorite animated movies soundtracks played on a piano by a girl wearing a nice colourful dress. How cliché! I know but this is what she likes, so be it. We quickly found a video of a girl dressed like Jasmine from Aladdin, singing “Speechless” while playing the piano.

A different example. I was personally inspired to learn mathematics when I heard a tale about Gauss, the brilliant mathematician. When Gauss was still at primary school, his teacher asked his class to add together all the numbers from 1 to 100, assuming that this task would occupy them for quite a while. He was shocked when young Gauss, after a few seconds thought, wrote down the answer 5050. The teacher couldn't understand how his pupil had calculated the sum so quickly in his head, but the eight year old Gauss pointed out that the problem was actually quite simple. He had added the numbers in pairs - the first and the last, the second and the second to last and so on, observing that 1+100=101, 2+99=101, 3+98=101, ...so the total would be 50 lots of 101, which is 5050.

What will you be looking for? Let me know in the comment section below.

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Stay tuned for step 2 coming next week!

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it!

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At times it is more challenging than other more entertaining activities but overcoming challenges helps us know one another deeply.

I am also happy to see my kids proud to become more resourceful and grateful I helped them achieve it. 

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Here below three specific benefits of learning many different things: 

1. The earlier, the easier, the better!

Children are like wet cement. Whatever falls on them makes an impression. Haim Ginott

Kids learn faster, with little effort and retain longer; they are naturally better learners. One way of  taking advantage of this temporary superior ability is by helping them learn as much as they can, about as many things as they can. 

Children quickly adapt to stimuli and thrive in any type of environment thanks to the higher level of plasticity of their brain and neuromuscular system and to the higher flexibility of their muscles, tendons, ligaments and cardio-respiratory system. 

Adults instead need to apply intense effort and focus to learn, and can only achieve big changes through a series of slow incremental improvements (Linkenhoker & Knudsen, 2002). 

For example, my daughter started on a balancing bike when she was 2 and learnt to ride a bicycle when she was 4. Last week she was complaining that when she rides at super slow speed the handle bar doesn’t remain straight but moves left and right. She was blaming the bike and couldn’t realize that it was her, instinctively moving the handle bar left and right to keep the bicycle balanced. Since she started so early, balancing a bicycle has become an involuntary reflex she cannot control. Now she can fully focus on a new skill like avoiding obstacles.

2. Stay fit for learning

The only constant in life is change. Heraclitus

It doesn’t matter what children learn as long as it helps them train to become better learners, able to quickly adapt to changes and even be actors of change. 

It is empowering, it builds confidence, confidence that no matter what happens they will always be able to achieve whatever they aim for and enjoy the process, too. 

Learning exercises their minds and bodies, pushing them to explore the world outside of their comfort zone, keeping them physically and mentally healthy, curious, interesting and alive.

Learning many different things engages multiple areas of children’s body and brain, acquiring a general level of fitness that keeps them ready for any future challenge and newly discovered passion. 

It helps develop general learning skills like: higher range of motion, coordination, improved memory for different things (shapes, melodies, movements, concepts…), sharper filtering mechanisms to focus on what is meaningful depending on the context, higher endurance to different types of efforts, intuition for understanding mechanisms and strategies.

For example, we are moving abroad and schools require a minimum level of fluency in English. Since my daughter learnt to read French at 4 she is learning to read English much faster, facilitating verbal comprehension and fluency. 

3. Diversity favours creativity

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. Pablo Picasso

Creative ideas result from the novel combination of two or more ideas that have been isolated from their usual association and context. In fact a long time of information acquisition is needed before creativity can emerge (Radford 1990).

The farther apart the components are, the more creative the idea is. Universality is one of the characteristics of creative people.

Creativity requires: 1) a large pool of elements to form associations, 2) speed to produce many associations, and 3) a good comparator to eliminate inappropriate solutions.

Learning different subjects and skills helps provide exactly the large pool of ideas needed to be creative. The rest is about constantly practicing to make valuable creative combinations. 

Personality has also a powerful influence on creativity at comparable levels of intelligence. Creativity is highly correlated with self-confidence, sociability, perseverance (Terman and Oden 1959). 

These personality traits can be improved through experience and practice. And learning new things is a good way to train those traits.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it!

Sometimes when I introduce my kids to a new activity they refuse to practice altogether. 

At first I thought they simply didn’t like the activity but I realized there was always one specific detail about the way the practice was set up that was holding them back. 

I just needed to find and change that detail to help them begin practicing. 

This concept also applies when children are blocked trying to acquire a new skill related to an activity they are already familiar with. Sometimes changing one detail can make all the difference. 

Find below a few practical examples based on my experience but I would love to hear yours, too! Just leave a comment or reply to me directly.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it!

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Reading: I needed to use books specifically designed for early readers like these (I can read by Harper, Ready To Read by Simon Spotlight, Premières lectures Larousse (French)). These books are written using a gigantic black font on white background, with double interline, short simple words repeated many times over and over. Training eye movement and memory is a critical aspect of reading often neglected. 

Arithmetic: I needed to use objects they love for counting and making operations. Colourful hair clips for my daughter and screwdriver bits for my son. Similarly a friend of mine told me his son learnt sums because he wanted to know the power of boats with two engines. 

Music: I needed to find the right instrument (voice for my daughter), the right catchy song (Disney movie songs or country songs worked for my daughter) and play it at much slower speed when practicing. Singing is also a good way to learn English for non native speakers.

A new language: I needed to start communicating with people using another language, for some reason just talking to my kids wasn’t enough. 

Swimming: I needed to bring my kids in a small swimming pool with warm water (above 30 degrees celsius). Oddly enough with time they got used to colder water but are still uncomfortable when we go to an Olympic sized pool. 

Climbing: I needed to bring my kids practicing in a climbing gym specifically designed for children. One with slides, funny looking holds and walls shaped like a castle. 

Skateboard: I needed to use a skateboard for kids with loose tracks and always hold their hand to make them feel safe so they could carve and push to the edge of their balancing skills. Also, going for long rides across town helped them learn how to quickly react to sudden changes in rolling speed caused by ground conditions to avoid falling. 

Football: I needed to bring my kids to practice on a real football field. After they lived, that experience practicing anywhere became easier.

Balancing bike: I needed to let them practice for 1 minute a few times a week so they could learn how to move the handlebar to keep the bike straight. Super grippy ground, tyres, and shoes also helped greatly in this phase. 

Karate: I needed to mark the side of the couch as the villain from animated movies. This way training kicks and punches became an adventure game.

Two wheel scooter: I needed to hold them while riding to help them understand they had to always lean on the side of their pushing leg. Riding a two wheel scooter is more difficult than riding a bicycle because if the rider leans on the side of his standing leg he is going to fall and won’t be able to put his leg to control or stop the fall. 

Inline skating: I needed to wear my skates and go for long rides together holding their hand to pull them. Exactly like for skateboarding, rides across town helped them learn how to quickly react to sudden changes in rolling speed caused by ground conditions to avoid falling. 

Gymnastics: I needed to buy a nice gymnastic suit that she could only wear for practicing gymnastics. Also seeing a group of gymnasts warming up for a competition, finalizing their makeup and adjusting hairs and clothes truly made the difference. 

Parkour: I needed to have them practice jumping and falling on soft mattresses than moving to grass, thick carpet, wood and finally pavement.

Yoga: Having an illustrated yoga audio book for kids made my daughter start practicing even though she lost interest growing up. 

Judo: I needed to sign them up to judo classes with their best friends.

Dancing: I needed to find the right dance teacher.

1. Sleep: obviously kids need good quality sleep in order to learn, help them go to bed early! Also research shows that naps after learning sessions improve learning consolidation. Naps might not be very practical, especially for active kids that only sleep when they are fully exhausted. But even frequent random 10 seconds breaks have shown to greatly enhance the speed and depth of learning (Bush et al. 2021 brain recordings showed neural replay, at 20 times the normal speed during those breaks, vastly increasing the amount of repetitions per unit of time). Personally, when I see my daughter showing signs of fatigue, I help her recovery by covering her eyes with my hand for a few seconds; I do it several times during the practice.

2. Desire: weeks before beginning a new practice I help my kids build desire for that particular skill or subject. Kids who are not willing to learn won’t learn, and will refuse to practice. When they start liking the activity at the point it becomes almost part of their identity, they are ready to start practicing. See below some practical examples on how to do that.

3. Practice: wait for the right time to practice or set routines, keep sessions short (1-20min) but frequent (few times per week). Prepare the practice session in advance, displaying hesitation makes kids lose focus. Alternate with different activities, deep breathing exercises or naps when engagement drops. Use many different approaches and perspectives, depending on the kid some might work better than others but they are all complementary to build a holistic comprehension. Give children minimal guidance, just enough to help them practice beyond their current capabilities. Break down skills and concepts into tiny subparts, practice them one at the time before combining them together. Slow down practice and build proficiency using oversimplified tasks before moving to the next level. Increase practicing speed to induce errors that will improve learning by triggering higher neuroplasticity.

4. Reward: the newer the practice the more encouragement kids need from you to endure the initial frustration of just not being able, yet. Little by little reduce reward to encourage kids to find more sustainable intrinsic motivation mechanisms. 

If you have any suggestion to improve this framework, please, leave a comment or just send me an email hitting the reply button. I plan to publish an updated version in the coming months.

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Desire: 

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in. Leonardo da Vinci

Some children are naturally passionate or even obsessed about certain activities and subjects. We, adults, should certainly help them cultivate those further but we should also encourage the discovery of new activities. In the end everything is connected to everything else.

I noticed that children enjoy pretty much any activity as far as they have achieved a certain level of mastery. Sometimes enough mastery to stop having fear, sometimes enough to be as good as the others or enough to enjoy practicing with minimal effort. But beginning is always the most difficult part because children often feel overwhelmed and discouraged by the challenge. 

I make it easier by building the child's desire to practice. Sometimes even at the point of making the activity almost part of their identity. Ideally the desire generates enough momentum to help the child go beyond the first more frustrating stages of learning, reaching the point where they start finding intrinsic motivation. 

Here are a few practical ideas to help you build desire:

1. Watch inspiring videos of people practicing the activity to learn. Even better if the children can identify with the performer, maybe because he/she is also a kid or he/she is wearing beautiful clothes or even animated movies of their favorite superheroes. As a child I became interested in engineering watching the animated series “Inspector Gadget”. Out of many cool videos, my daughter got into skateboarding thanks to this hilarious episode of the Simpsons. Unimaginable!

2. if the activity they are learning requires tools, leave them around, let them experiment, disassemble them and tune them, anything helps to create an emotional connection. Visiting dedicated shops is also helpful. Choose the style of the tool they like the most (color, size, material, design, logos, add stickers and glitters).

3. Bring them to places where people train, we are social beings afterall. Find places especially designed for kids. For example the gym where we climb has climbing walls shaped as castles with holds shaped as food, toys and monsters. The right atmosphere is a powerful motivator.

4. Practice the activity your-self and show them how much you enjoy it. Let them see how you struggle to improve. Maybe even give them a little role inside your practice. For example my daughter enjoys roller skating much more and she practices longer if I am also wearing my in-line skates.

5. Surround him/her with beautiful inspiring posters and photographs.

Practice:

Practice is the best of all instructors. Publilius Syrus

Practice is the core of learning and the way you practice makes all the difference. In learning science there is a vast body of research on different ways of designing learning practices, like: project based learning, problem based learning, inquiry based learning, collaboration based learning, competition based learning, game based learning, computer based learning, informal learning, authentic disciplinary practices based learning (they are also all known under slightly different names). But before going into details I would like to share four general tips I use to make practice more enjoyable and effectively. 

One: with children, always be patient and flexible. It might sound obvious but it is very difficult in practice. It is about finding the right balance between giving children freedom and requiring some discipline, so be sure to always have extra time to start practicing only when they are mentally ready and committed.

Two: set up daily routines, usually children acquire routines easily and they like to stick to the routines, even if the routine is about things they initially don’t like doing that much. For example, the routine can be something you do every day before school, after school or before going to bed. Be sure that the routine includes something pleasant, like reading a book to them before they read a book to you, or practice music after dinner before having dessert, or practice algebra verbally on the way home after school.  

Three: Always present any practice from many different angles, it will help you find the one that works best for your children and also increase their curiosity, need for novelty and deepen their comprehension. If an approach doesn’t work, use another one but don’t throw it away just yet. Test it again the following week and every week after that, until it will eventually work or not... Use different tools, techniques, representations, make games, explore practical uses. Below Richard Feynman also explaining this concept.

For example, my daughter didn’t want to learn to play any musical instrument. I tried many different instruments and approaches for years but nothing worked until I realized that she loves singing and our voice is a musical instrument, too.

Let’s go back to the different learning techniques. In my opinion, most of those I mentioned at the beginning aren’t very practical for children although they sound extremely valid from a theoretical perspective. In my experience they are mostly helpful at learning how to make use of things children have already learnt rather than helping them learn new things. Maybe because the designed practices are too complex and don’t promote repetition enough. Also, in these practices, learning isn’t structured hierarchically, so it makes it more difficult for children to grasp the big picture, trace dependencies and understand how things relate to one another. 

The four techniques I like the most and I use all the time are: scaffolding/guidance, break down activities in smaller bite sized components and performing in slow motion or at higher speed . Using these techniques young learners can practice outside their zone of proximal development (ZPD, Vygotsky), extending their range of independent activity. Let’s see some practical examples:

Scaffolding/Guidance: tutors can help children learn by manipulating their hands, feet and body or by rephrasing their words to better align with the task or giving hints to guide the actions of the learner. As the learner progresses, the tutor's support vanishes like the scaffoldings to make a building. Through scaffolding tutors might also catch errors detrimental to the practice while allowing other insightful errors. One important objective is to keep guidance minimal, just enough to maintain the learner engaged, dynamically balancing the frustration of making errors with the joy of doing new things right. By repeated interaction the learner imitates the modeled actions and associates them with the verbal directive of the task. This mechanism is often referred to as prolepsis. Because of its nature, scaffolding works best in one to one tutoring or small groups of students, finally becoming extremely impractical in large classrooms. It also relies on the particular connection between tutor and learner which is difficult to code into a standard procedure. 

Break it down: I strongly believe that children can learn anything at any age but only if the tutor is capable of breaking down the skills and concepts into many tiny subparts that can be practiced and acquired individually before being put back together by the child. But how many subparts? As many as necessary until the child is able to start performing that specific part even if with a bit of guidance. In general I have to break down a good tutorial made for adults in 10 times more subparts to make it appropriate for my children. Some activities are so obvious to adults that there isn’t any tutorial on the internet or the tutorials are for super skilled players who want to perfect their technique to the tiniest detail. 

Slow it down: when possible, slowing down the speed at which children practice can make them learn better. Most physical activities can be performed in super slow motion to give the brain extra time to analyse and react to perform the next step. Even jumping and catching can be manipulated by increasing the height of the jump with a trampoline or the distance of the throw for the object to catch. Similarly mental activities can be performed slowly by reducing the workload and increasing the time dedicated to perform them. Again it allows children to think deeper and differently about the same thing, ultimately improving their understanding.

Speed it up: Speed things up, around 20% beyond what children can manage, they will make many more mistakes but when speed is brought back to normal they will perform better. Errors induced during higher practicing speed improve learning by stimulating the release of chemicals to increase neuroplasticity (Epinephrine, Acetylcholine and Dopamine).

For example, I employed the techniques above to teach my children how to ride a skateboard in 10 steps. It took two years for my daughter who started at 3 and I just started with my son who is now 2 years old. I couldn’t use the tutorials I found on the internet probably because they are made for children older than 5.

Reward:

Instruction does much, but encouragement everything. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Children have innate intrinsic motivation mechanisms that help them learn autonomously. These work well when success is obvious and immediate but when they start learning more complex things success is delayed and they don’t know if they are making progress, hence they seek for parents’ reward, extrinsic motivation. Reward is fundamental for reinforcing good practice. 

Learning how to find and appreciate intrinsic reward is our ultimate goal but it is almost a skill that needs to be trained. Untrained individuals like children only recognize intrinsic reward when some big progress has been made while adults can find satisfaction from minor improvements or just from understanding what and how they need to improve. 

In particular, children have a harder time to perform challenging tasks when the intrinsic reward is delayed and uncertain because they don’t know how to assess the probability of succeeding nor the time and effort required. We can encourage children to practice by making them appreciate small improvements, by guiding them to assess how far they are from accomplishing a certain milestone and plan accordingly. 

Reward and encouragement come in different forms and can be used at different times for different purposes. 

1. Before practice, verbal encouragement to boost children’s confidence. Encouragements can be targeted to overcome particular fears or weaknesses, to increase readiness or willingness, to emphasize the most desirable aspects of the practice and to remind future delayed reward coming. For example I encourage my daughter to not be afraid of tackling boys when playing football.

2. During the practice, verbal encouragement can be used to push children to make an extra effort, like coaches do with professional athletes. 

3. At certain intermediate milestones. This one can be verbal (encouragements or expressions), physical (high fives, hugs or handshakes ) or other pleasant experiences like food, video games, songs, videos… At the beginning, include many intermediate milestones into the practice, then make them more and more sporadic until you eliminate them altogether. For example I like the mini-smarties, I give them 1 to 3 depending on the milestone. They are tiny (=less sugar) and colourful (=more pleasure).

4. At the end of practice, you can repeat and amplify all the rewards mentioned above for the intermediate milestones. You can also add longer experiences like going to desirable places. Use verbal encouragement to highlight wins and progress. 

5. After practice, again all types of encouragement are welcomed. An additional one I like is to watch videos and pictures of them practicing. Usually children are more egocentric than adults, they like to watch themselves practicing and it reinforces their identity associated with the specific practice.

Research emphasizes the power of “random intermittent reward” to maximize effort performed while keeping dopamine constant. This approach solves the problem that the more regularly you expect reward the more potent and extreme that reward has to be remain effective at generating effort. I tried experimenting with these findings but I couldn’t make it work. In my experience children immediately lose interest if they don’t understand how reward can be achieved.

How do you help kids learn things? Tell me by leaving a comment or just send me an email hitting the reply button.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it!

So I stopped adopting a particular approach and started experimenting, constantly altering all things related to the learning activities. My objective became to find the right setup and eventually extract some general principles that could be applied to any activity. Let me tell you about a few differences I noticed about the way kids learn:

1. Kids make progress suddenly hence be patient, keep practicing and don’t focus too much on progress otherwise you might be disappointed. 

2. Kids can learn even with ridiculously short sessions (1-20min) if they practice often enough (few times a week).

3. Kids learn by being guided instead of instructed so look for ways to guide them without talking or to minimize verbal communication.

4. Kids learn intuitively by sensing but they need your help to practice beyond what they are capable of.

Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves. Jean Piaget

Kids make progress suddenly

When children are learning, they might not display gradual progress nor increased interest in the practice. Parents and educators who are patiently investing time and energy trying to teach children something might be frustrated by not seeing any progress, maybe at the point of giving up altogether. 

When adults are learning they make roughly steady progress improving session after session, week after week and month after month. Children instead might not display any progress for months or even years, despite hours of practice. Sometimes they even regress… can you imagine something more frustrating?

But magically, one day, they master it! Every time I see it, I am shocked. How can it happen at once? How is it possible that one day they don’t know how to do something and the very next day they master it, love it and keep repeating it!

The only possible explanation I have is that children's brains process learning in batches, in the background even when they aren’t practicing. The batch is being processed all the time but they don’t display any progress until the batch is completely finished processing. 

For example, my daughter Elisa has been doing baby parkour at the gym since the age of 2, now she just turned 5. Jumping has always been difficult for her, in part because she has vertigo. Even for tiny jumps I always had to hold her hand and lately, when she started jumping alone, she was constantly afraid and ending up landing on her butt. Then one day, at the park, out of the blue, by her own initiative she jumped from a high platform to another one below, almost fell and instinctively made a second jump to avoid falling. She didn’t hesitate a second, like if she knew what she was doing. She enjoyed it so much that she kept doing it 10 times in a row. I had to stop her because her legs were getting tired and eventually she might have fallen for real.

Here is a different example. When Elisa was learning to read at 3 she had trouble reading the word “est” (pronunciation /ɛ/, french for the English verb “is”), I had to remind her how to read it literally hundreds of times. And yet, she never knew how to read it. I suspect because she wasn’t accepting the concept that some words don’t follow the general pattern and have to be memorized instead. But finally, one day, she started reading it correctly and never misread it since, not even once.

Similarly, she never displayed much interest in reading and for two years I always had to negotiate to get her practicing for a few minutes, until one day, of her own initiative, she started picking books from the shelves and reading them to her little brother, and kept reading them from the first page to the last one. She also started reading books to her classmates in school. Again, change came suddenly. 

My practical advice is to have faith, be patient and keep practicing without focusing too much on progress.

Kids can learn even with ridiculously short practice sessions (1-20min)

Usually adults need to practice with 45-90 minutes long sessions to make progress. Children instead can make significant progress with much shorter sessions, ranging from 1 minutes to 20 minute, as long as they are frequent enough (at least a few times per week).

The length of the session is determined by the ability of the children to stay focused. In general children can focus only for very short periods, especially when they are introduced to new activities, they saturate quickly, want to stop and go play with something else.

The upside is that children can learn many different things each day, often making surprising connections between some apparently unrelated things they have learnt. Probably this is because their mind is more flexible and empty than adults.

If I had to speculate I would say that children need less practice because they are learning simpler things but also it seems like children’s brain has a greater ability to learn by constantly simulating lived experiences subconsciously. 

For example, when my daughter turned 2 years old I bought her a balance bike (a bicycle without pedals). I used to bring her outside to ride the bike but at the beginning she would only do it for one minute maximum, refusing to jump on the bike again for the rest of the day and sadly I had to carry the bike around myself. I was frustrated also because I thought she didn’t learn anything and that she didn’t like cycling, a passion that both me and my wife share deeply. Nonetheless I kept persisting and after a few one minute long sessions I noticed that she learnt how to move the handlebar to balance the bike. This milestone helped her feel secure, find pleasure and ride for much longer.

My son who recently started on a balance bike displayed the exact same behaviour, once he understood how to use the handlebar he started riding the bike everywhere inside the house. Though going for long rides outside is still a challenge. I am helping him push a little bit to get him to ride longer in order to improve his pushing skills.

My practical advice is to practice frequently even if with ridiculously short sessions.

Kids learn by being guided instead of instructed

Children have difficulties learning by following verbal instructions, especially when they are younger than 6 years old. In my experience, for physical activities they learn best when the instructor repeatedly guides them to perform the right movement by holding their hands and feet. And, for mental activities, by guiding them to practice with exercises (this method is called Scaffolding, I will explain more in my next article).

Children can only follow instructions when they are familiar with the specific task or the task itself doesn’t require a high level of precision. 

For example, if they are told to get on a skateboard they know how to do it, but if they are told to position their feet in a specific way on the board they aren’t able to do it precisely, even if you showed them physically what it meant already a few times or if the shape of their feet is drawn on the board. The instructor has to repeatedly re-position their feet in the right spot and, after enough repetitions, finally they will recognize the feeling of having their feet in a specific position and spontaneously adjust to find that feeling. In this video I do just that with my son.

Similarly, when they learn to read, we can explain all the general rules but in my experience, once they know the alphabet phonetically, it is more effective to guide them to read simple books, helping them read the words they can’t read, yet. Letting them derive the rules autonomously or explaining it only when faced with the particular word in the book. Some books for early readers are very good at selecting words to introduce rules implicitly and gradually and providing enough repetitions to let children acquire the rule by practicing. (see HarperCollins - I can read and in french: Larousse - Mes premières lectures 100% syllabiques). These books are also written using simple fonts, big characters and big interlines to help the untrained eye of children (few people know that reading requires a lot of eye movement training).

At the end of the day this is also the way children learn their mother tongue, just by practicing in a real life context, which is completely different from the way most adults learn foreign languages: using books and taking classes.

My practical advice is to find ways to guide children through practice by talking as little as possible.

Kids learn intuitively by sensing

Children also learn autonomously by following their senses and intuition while practicing. Compared to adults they are more inclined to naturally evolve their technique towards minimizing effort. I think because, unlike adults, they don’t have a specific representation in their brain of what needs to be done, so they just go with the flow and naturally adjust to do what comes easier. 

For example, I have been helping my daughter to practice climbing. I don’t know any technique about climbing so I started by helping her carry her weight and guiding her to find the closest hold. After two years of practice, at the age of 5, she now practices autonomously. She taught her-self how to balance, shift her body weight to facilitate the climb and how to fall. Her movements are calm and smooth, she checks her grips before applying force, she always stays upright, very close to the wall. It seems she received proper training. Of course she needs to take some formal training to improve her technique at some point, here I just wanted to highlight at what extent children can also learn autonomously and intuitively by feeling with their senses.

Similarly, when she was 5-6 months old, I gave her a tiny bite of food for the first time. I left it on the table in front of her. She put her hand on top of it and grabbed it deep inside her fist. She brought the fist to her mouth but couldn’t put it inside, so she put it back on the table. She repeated the exact same experience once more, didn’t succeed and put it back on the table again. Finally, at the third attempt, she changed strategy and grabbed the bite of food using only two fingers so she could easily drop it into her mouth. In contrast, state of the art machine learning algorithms require millions of attempts to figure out. Here MIT professor Josh Tenenbaum explains how human minds are different from state of the art artificial intelligence neural networks, also check the work of his computational cognitive science lab.

My practical advice is to let children learn autonomously by helping them practice beyond what they are capable of rather than teaching rules or explaining concepts!

If you are interested in cognitive science, check the work of Susan Carey, professor at Harward who has long researched how the learning process differs between children adults and primates. Here an interesting one about children logically understanding “no” and “not”.

Have you also noticed something different about the way kids learn? Tell me by leaving a comment or just send me an email hitting the reply button. We will discuss it in part 2!

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it!

In contrast, most of the learning methods I could find were instruction based, not well suited for young kids (2-10 years) or very specific to certain subjects.

So, I have decided to embark on a quest to explore how kids learn and find a practical framework to help them learn anything effectively and playfully.

"Learning is more than the acquisition of the ability to think; it is the acquisition of many specialized abilities for thinking about a variety of things." Lev S. Vygotsky

Where will this quest bring us?

Interviewing influential people in the children’s learning space: researchers, writers, teachers, coaches, tutors, nannies, entrepreneurs, artists and parents. Asking their opinion on specific learning behaviours and methods, creating an engaging and entertaining brainstorming like conversation.

Sharing articles based on my personal experience with children. The objective is to raise visibility and start debates on topics that haven’t been largely investigated, yet.

Testing, experimenting and reviewing some well known and less well known learning practices, methodologies and apps to measure how difficult and effective they really are.

Extrapolating practical tips from the work of some of the most well known figures in the learning space like John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, James Gibson, Maria Montessori but also from influential people in adjacent subjects like creativity, curiosity, intuition, and performance: Hans Eysenck, Ken Robinson, Richard Feynman, Mario Livio, Gary Klein, Michael Michalko…

Plus all the topics you would like to discuss, debate or just find an answer to. If you have one in mind already, please, just tell me by leaving a comment or send me an email hitting the reply button.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it!

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