Gone are the days when educational institutes followed a lecture-based teaching approach. Today, it’s all about the hands-on approach. This approach helps children develop critical skills, grasp difficult concepts, and foster a love for learning. It engages children in practical experiences and makes abstract ideas more understandable and tangible for young minds.
No matter what career pathway you have in mind for your child, whether it’s a doctor, engineer, skeleton athlete, or an artist, exposing children to hands-on learning can benefit your child in the long run. This goes for children of all backgrounds because a child’s mind is the same, regardless of which background they’re born into.
In this blog, I want to shed light on the importance of hands-on activities for children and how they build brilliant minds.
It Improves Memory Retention
Hands-on activities follow a simple principle – learning by doing. This method is proven to stir kinesthetic and tactile experiences, which solidify learning. When children actively engage with study material like conducting experiments, building models, or crafting arty pieces, their brains are stimulated, leading to better memory retention. Hands-on learning is a multi-sensory learning approach that engages multiple senses and ensures the children don’t forget their lessons easily, as with passive observation.
It Builds Critical Thinking Skills
Hands-on activities help build critical thinking skills in children, which will help them in their childhood as well as when they grow up. When children participate in practical experiences, they navigate through different tasks, and in doing so, they encounter several challenges. Challenges require children to understand the situation, develop solutions, and make decisions based on their knowledge and observation. This builds analytical skills and teaches children to learn from their actions, laying the foundation for problem-solving abilities.
It Promotes Creativity
Another way hands-on activities build brilliant minds is by promoting creativity. Creativity isn’t limited to making art if that’s what you think. Creativity is the ability to think in new ways. Children naturally become more creative since the environments that focus on hands-on learning are full of opportunities for creative expression. They are given the freedom to think and innovate, and this is what promotes creativity, which is instilled in them and reflected in everything they do in life.
It Boosts Self-Esteem
When a child participates in an activity and completes it, they experience a sense of pride and achievement. It encourages them to keep working and accomplishing goals. This constant loop of a sense of achievement and pride builds their self-esteem and makes them confident. A child’s early years are critical for how they grow up, and when a child is confident as a child, they grow to become a confident adult.
While most modern education institutes follow a hands-on approach today, there are children of underprivileged communities that aren’t exposed to modern education like the underserved communities of Africa.
If you want to make this world a better place where all children receive an equal opportunity to grow into brilliant adults, don’t hesitate to donate to Hope of a Billion Foundation, a foundation I, Ghana’s first skeleton athlete, built. I come from an underprivileged background, and I know your contribution can make a huge difference for these children!