Scientific fields are considered to be the future. As the demand for low skill jobs decreases, STEM jobs are on the rise, which means that kids today should study for tomorrow’s demands. To gain meaningful employment, a lot of preparation is required, and it’s never too early to start. For this reason, it is a good idea to motivate kids to like science from a young age.
Start with developing reading skills
One thing parents should do, as early as possible, is to help their children learn to read. While you may wonder how reading could be connected to science, the relationship may not be direct, but it acts as an excellent foundation for learning, regardless of the field of study.
Read to your kids as often as possible, and teach them how to do that, as well. Reading stimulates the areas of the brain that deal with analyzing and extracting information, and it also serves for developing communication skills.
Encourage your kids to read out loud, and fill their room with books. This will help stimulate their natural curiosity, and they will find it much easier to enjoy scientific fields later on.
Teach through games
Science is all about experimenting and understanding the complex relationships between cause and effect. That is why many games can help kids develop their minds in a way that is beneficial for learning science. It is not a simple coincidence that many children who love to play computer games end up working in scientific fields later in life.
Of course, it would be a good idea to focus on games that stimulate the kids’ love for science from the start. Game-based learning is considered, today, to be highly effective in motivating kids to learn science, so that’s a strategy you should keep in mind.
Provide your kids with science tools
Children are natural observers. They question everything, they want to understand how things work, and that’s something that parents should build on for developing the necessary skills for a STEM career.
The best way to stimulate and help develop this natural curiosity is by providing your kids with tools they can use for scientific purposes. Depending on their age, these tools could be more or less complicated. For instance, you should search for the best microscope for children so that you could offer a means to run experiments and research.
There are science tool kits readily available, in various fields, such as math, chemistry, and others. As they play, kids learn, and they won’t find studying a chore if that’s how science becomes an integral part of their lives.
Offer plenty of room for mistakes and failure
If you have ever watched Mythbusters, there is one interesting lesson the creators of the show gave away, most probably, without having an intention to lecture. And that lesson is that failure is always an option. That is the essence of a scientific experiment. If it doesn’t work the first time, some things must be changed. Rinse and repeat, and that’s how you get somewhere.
The same philosophy should apply to teaching kids how to embrace science. You should not just give kids a recipe to follow, but encourage them to run their experiments and learn from their mistakes.
The focus should never be on performance
Learning is a process, and if you only focus on a child’s performance, that might make him or her cautious, and unwilling to try new things. Instead of paying attention only to results, you should consider what aspects stimulate your kid’s natural curiosity. That can give you a lot of valuable input on what science fields he or she may like best.
