TEFL Bowerbank Maine

Author and assistant Professor of childhood education Martha Carlton, Ph.D. claim that there are basically four characteristic areas that ‘test' if a child is highly motivated or not. The areas are persistence, choice of challenge, dependency on adults and emotion. The parent guide from the Parent Institute suggests that there are seven ways in which to motivate your child, understanding learning styles is an important one of those ways. My own brief experience of volunteer teaching school age children has shown me that these characteristics to be a somewhat true gauge of motivation in school age children as well as preschool children. I have noted that children do have a short attention span but also mostly do want to get it right and be successful. I also noted that if the subjects that are chosen to teach are made interesting enough that the children will be self-motivated enough to want to learn them. Most children are motivated to learn and want to do well amongst their peers. I have found the best way to keep the class motivated is to keep the subjects chosen short and plan plenty of activities alongside the study time to keep things fun and interesting. I also noted that if the children's language ability is of different levels in the class that it can cause some loss of motivation for the lower level learners. They can then become distracting to the other students, simply because they can't keep up and don't want to lose face in front of their peers. The children I taught loved to play bingo so I used this fact to motivate them to come to the voluntary class. We always played a few games of bingo after the lessons, besides it helped the children to still speak english but without really thinking about it. To understand and recognize the factors that' test' for motivation here are the details of the four characteristic areas cited according to the research. Persistence, if the child is motivated from an early age to be persistent with tasks and not to give up easily; then it's thought that this will show through in the child's motivation in learning as they develop. children learn persistence when they are successful at challenges. Choice of challenge, if the child is motivated with attention early on for its achievements; then it's thought that the child will be able to select for themselves the right level of task. children that are properly motivated will select a task that they can complete but that does provide a challenge. Whereas children who are not as motivated might choose a task that they can easily complete so they can feel a higher level of satisfaction. Dependency of adults - if a child is too dependent on an adult it's thought that this shows a lack in the child's motivation. The children that need constant attention show a lack of independence which is needed to succeed in the learning process. Parents can encourage their child to become more independent before school age by having them complete simple small games or tasks on their own. Emotion - a child that is highly motivated will show a positive display of emotions; whereas a child that is not motivated will become quite, sullen and not very interactive. Overall, in summary I can conclude that self-motivation stems from a much earlier age than most would think, though can still be taught at school if recognized, understood and supported. It really depends on how things start out before you start school with your perception of learning and then how that continues as you start and continue on through school years. The teacher's role in motivating children and keeping them motivated is a tough but important one. Understanding learning styles can also help to motivate and should be taken into consideration when planning lessons. Without the proper motivation for learning the children will not learn as they could, teaching them will be a tougher task. They will lose interest and become quickly bored and might become disruptive to the rest of the class. This pattern could follow them through to adult life as well. Resource: http://www.nasponline.org/resources/home_school/earlychildmotiv_ho.aspx http://asfms.net/parentworkshops/pdfs/SevenProvenWaystoMotivatechildren.pdf