Are you a busy mom? Do you feel like you should be teaching your child things but just don’t have the time. It’s hard to sit down and explicitly teach, so what if I told you that you could teach your child something very important and you could do it every day, even if you only had 10 minutes.
Would you believe me if I told you that you don’t even need any materials. No paper, no glue, no workbooks, no nothing! You can teacher your child something every day in your normal every day conversations.
The most important thing you can teach your child is how to be an independent thinker and problem solver.
Does your child constantly ask you questions? Does your child ask you questions that they should know the answer to?
Here’s where you can start:
When your child asks you a question rather than answering, start asking:
1. What do you think?
2. Can you solve that problem?
These questions will put the thinking back on your child. Rather than you thinking for your child, you child will have to try and solve their own problem. By doing this, you are teaching your child how to problem solve. This is a very important life skill. The best thing you can teach!
You first begin by asking them to try and answer their own questions. Helping your child to solve their own problems is key to your child’s future success in life.
When I taught Kindergarten, half of my day during the first month of school was spent training my students to solve their own problems. I would constantly say, please solve your problem and walk away. You wouldn’t believe how many kids would follow me as I walked away. They would continue to ask me their question because they had never been taught how to solve their own problems.
So, the next time your child asks you a question, try asking them a question in return. See what happens. This is the best thing you can do to teach your child every day even if you don’t have very much time.
Things to say when you’ve already answered a question:
1. I’ve already answered that
2. I’d like you to try and solve it yourself first.
3. If you try it and it doesn’t work out, come ask me for help.
What did your child do when you asked them a question instead of answering?
