Every child is born to learn and as a parent you are your child’s first teacher. Although society has changed over the centuries, the way children learn best hasn’t. We can look to the hunter/gatherer societies to learn how best to facilitate our children’s learning – there are some very interesting observations to be made.

In traditional societies it was not deemed necessary to try to teach a child something they did not want to learn. Rather, the role of the teacher was to support and facilitate the child’s natural curiosity and explorations. Right from birth every child naturally wants to learn and grow – you couldn’t stop them if you wanted, so why try when you can simply allow?

Time to Play
At the end of infancy (about 4 years old) the children would be granted total freedom to explore their own world from dawn till dusk – usually in the company of other children of various ages. This is something our modern society frowns upon and parents fear judgement over, but this free-range exploration allowed children to follow their own natural curiosity and learn more about this world through all the senses, and always at their own pace safe in the knowledge that elders were nearby.

Cultural Tools
We tend to think of toys as plastic stuff in packaging. However, traditional toys were simply tools as used by the adults to do their daily work, and this is what our children crave too – real tools for real life, scaled down if necessary to enable them to copy what they see around them every day.

Toys were never meant to be a distraction or an amusement but simply to support a child’s natural desire to learn and grow. Today this looks like building bricks, cookery kit, role play and dressing up, and of course arts and crafts. But children do not learn in isolation.

Tolerant Acceptance
This brings us to the most important part of being your child’s teacher – togetherness. Your child trusts you, wants you and learns from you, so to allow him or her into your space, to watch, to see, to try and to do, is invaluable. All it takes is for you to slow down and relax, enjoy the journey of discovery and, who knows, you may even enjoy your ‘boring jobs’ that little bit more.

Discovery Walks
Try a simple thing like going for a walk and, rather than hurrying to get somewhere, choose to simply amble, allowing your child to see what they can see, to find things and ask questions. And please, don’t be scared that you won’t know the answer. It’s perfectly fine to say “I don’t know, let’s look it up when we get home”. Here, mobile phones and tablets can be our best friends too, from taking pictures to Googling answers, sharing your findings to building a project based website. Your child will also get a lesson in modern day technology, and how cool is that?