The Truth about the Importance of Extra-Curricular Activities

Extra-curricular activities are an essential part of education curricula. Though these activities do not come under the academic curriculum, its importance in the growth of a child’s overall development cannot be neglected. Also, it is said that extra-curricular activities are not considered to be an essential part of a child’s life, but that is not the case.

Just like a plant cannot grow only by watering; similarly, the child’s brain development and intelligence cannot be enhanced only by academic studies. A diverse set of skills, principles, and values come with participating in activities that include teamwork, communication, discipline, accountability, to name a few.

Kaintal School, the best ICSE school in Patiala, creates a strong sense of duty, discipline and motivate the students to participate in extra-curricular activities. Let’s have a look at the benefits of these activities in a student’s life.

Strong Social Skills: Involvement in extra-curricular activities decreases anti-social behaviors, and students acquire communication and relationship building skills. Also, studies have shown that participating in these activities reduces the risk of committing suicide and less likely to do self-harm.

Growth in Academic Performance: Participating in sports and outdoor games help in building stamina, increases focus, handles pressure in challenging times, and possess a more positive attitude towards learning and higher academic aspirations.

Accountability and Commitment: Students who participate in extra-curricular activities foster a sense of responsibility and commitment to the sports or activities they are part of. The feeling of being responsible and commitment also extends in other areas of their lives.

High Exposure: Extra-curricular activities such as art & craft, photography, singing, sports, and games give child exposure to new opportunities. Who knows a child may turn these hobbies into passions and end up building a career in their lives.

Unity in Diversity: Many students who participate in these activities help them in adapting and learning about new cultures and rituals when they go abroad or a new place.

Kaintal School, counted among top ten schools in Patiala, believes group playing and interactions give a sense of belongingness to people from diverse backgrounds pursuing similar interests and maintain ever-lasting friendships and bonds.

Involvement of Parents in Child Education

The success of a student in life is not only determined by how prestigious the school is that child attends but the extent to which a child’s parents are involved in their child’s education and encourage learning at home. The involvement of parents in a child’s education makes the child a lifelong learner.

Parent involvement includes several different forms of participation in a child’s education, such as attending school functions, monitoring homework, providing encouragement, and modeling desired behavior. Parent involvement is directly proportional to the child’s achievement. Schools that conduct programs such as involving parents reading with their child and supporting their homework at home show phenomenal results.

Kaintal School, the best ICSE schools in Patiala, believes there is a relationship between parent involvement and a child’s outcome in terms of attitude and behavior such as absenteeism, classroom behavior, motivation, and retention, which leads us to the positive attitudes and social behavior.

Parent engagement also helps in creating a more positive learning environment for every student. It is the shared responsibility of both parents and teachers to help their children meet their educational goals. In parent engagement, teachers relate to parents as an advisor who guides them through academic support of their child where teachers hold the responsibility to set the educational goals.

Parents also have valuable information or knowledge about their child that teachers might not know and with parent engagement, perspectives from both parents and teachers can enrich and helpful in student’s learning experience.

Takeaway: Teachers and administrators need to plan an effective process for involving parents and how they wish to engage them.

Kaintal School, the best schools in Patiala, provides training and orientation programs, encourage parent involvement from the first day of a child entering school, and communicate with parents that their contribution makes a great deal of difference in their child’s school performance and achievements.

Developing Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Skills in Students

In this digital era, it has become hard for students to connect with people in real life as they are glued to the blue screens which have produced a massive shift in how people interact and communicate. It is a rising concern to the future of students lacking interpersonal and intrapersonal skills as it affects their various parts of lives, and with the future workforce.

Interpersonal skills involve the combination of various skills such as listening, verbal and non-verbal communication, teamwork and creative thinking. The root of interpersonal skills lies in the self-reflection of the individual, which help in becoming mature and cope up with the world. Therefore, Kaintal School, counted among top schools in Patiala, believes developing intrapersonal skills help in developing interpersonal skills.

Let’s see how we, as teachers and parents, can help our students and children develop interpersonal and intrapersonal skills:

1. Basic Manners: Encourage positive social behavior by teaching the importance of “please” and “thank you”. At the same time, we need to make use of these words in daily conversations as students learn from hearing and watching the behavior of others.

2. Personality Differences: Every person is different and unique, and it is unwise to tell students that they will like everything about their future friends, neighbors, or co-workers. Reminding students about being patient with others, and finding the “sweet spot” by teaching the lesson of self-respect, and avoiding behaviors that push people away or dominating the conversation is crucial to understand and respect personality differences.

3. Collaboration Practice: One of the best ways to develop these skills is to form groups of different students and posing a problem or challenge-based activities to them. Please make sure that students pursue legitimate goals, and that work should lead to students practicing interpersonal skills working together.

4. Explicitly Practicing: Guiding students to explicitly practice the skills by providing scenarios and challenges such as "what would you do if you have been in someone else’s shoes", would help them in building and practicing empathy and self-awareness which is the foundation of intrapersonal skills.

Students who possess excellent intrapersonal and interpersonal skills are considered to have success in personal and professional life. Kaintal School, best schools in Patiala, help the students become better human beings through the process of self-realisation by fostering qualities of respect for others.

Teaching Kids About Respect

The most important lesson that can be taught to children is respect. Teach them about it just like the way you teach them about how to read and write. It is the easiest way to teach them respect. Show them how to respect others after all they will your footsteps right from the start. 

Kaintal School, the ICSE school in Patiala, has come up with various tips on how to teach and show respect to children:

 

Respect Your Kids

To teach kids about something you will have to inculcate those values in yourself too. the key to do so is to correct them politely and respectfully.

 

Treat Everybody Around You With Respect

The way you speak and treat others is a reflection of who you are and they will follow exactly you therefore, it is important to show respect to everyone. That’s how your kids will learn to be kind and show humility.

 

Instill a Positive Atmosphere for Your Kids

Never scold your child in front of others this discourages them. Do not embarrass your child, try to encourage and appreciate their ideas.

 

Take Accountability

When you make a mistake, apologize, even if it is a small one. Your kids will learn to take responsibility for the things they do in the long run.

 

Be Polite

Having a positive atmosphere at home is immensely important. Try to use words like “Thank-you” and “Please” often. Never push them to do something they aren’t ready to do.

 

Follow Rules

Never try to break rules in front of your kids. They tend to likely take stuff for granted. Make them learn the importance of rules and regulations to instill discipline in them.

 

Encourage Them to Respect Themselves

When a child learns the art of self-respect, he will eventually learn to respect other people. If you tell him that his opinion matters, he will be able to listen to others as well.

 

Kaintal School, considered among the top ten schools in Patiala, look forward to building our students and turn them into future leaders.

Inductive Model of Teaching

The goal of Models of teaching is to let students learn how to learn, and that should be the primary goal of education. The focus of education should be devoted to helping the students build their capacity to learn, primarily, learning how to learn. Kaintal School, the best school in Patiala, believes teaching models not only help to develop pupils’ understanding of the subject matter being taught but also provide pupils with a tool they can use to support their learning – both now and later in life.

 

Inductive Teaching Model requires pupils to sort, classify information, and generate hypothesis or rules. This process of thinking inductively can be a powerful tool for solving problems and can provide students with the skills and techniques they can use later in life. And, this will only happen if the teacher not only teaches the lesson but also makes explicit what they are doing through the use of metacognitive processes and involving them in ‘thinking through’ the lesson.

 

The inductive teaching model encourages pupils of all abilities to process the information according to the pupil’s logical order. Inductive teaching strategies are based on three stages that are involved in the inductive model of thinking process:

 

1. Concept Formation

This stage involves

• identifying and enumerating the data that are relevant to a problem
• grouping items based on similarity
• developing categories and labels for the groups

To engage students in each of the above activities, teachers need to come up with strategic questions such as “what did you see?”, “what belongs together?”, “what we would call these groups?” would likely to induce the students to enumerate a list, grouping of things and developing labels or categories.

 

2. Interpretation of Data

Determining cause-and-effect relationships among data is required to build the mental muscle of operations that includes interpreting, inferring, and generalizing. This stage is propelled by the teacher’s eliciting questions like that in the case of concept-formation strategy.

 

3. Application of Principles

This last strategy follows the first two leading the students from concept-formation activities to activities requiring interpretation of data and then requiring the application of principles. Teachers in this stage help students predict consequences from the conditions that have been established or applying principles to explain new phenomena.

 

Kaintal School is the ICSE Affiliated School in Patiala that makes sure the students grow intellectually through the Inductive Model of Teaching.

Info: ukessays.com

How To Make Your Kids Smarter

Exploring the science between what makes your kids happier and smarter is essential. Kaintal School, ICSE school in Patiala, helps you explore ways backed by science to make your kid smarter while improving his IQ at the same time.

Music lessons: 

Research has shown that music lessons make kids smarter. They tend to exhibit a greater increase in their IQ. Whether an individual is young or old, musical training gives students learning advantages. 

Read together:

If you have got small kids who are still learning to read. Don’t let them just look at those bright pictures in a book while it is you who is doing all the reading. Focus your attention on the important words while reading and make them repeat them. Shared book reading is an effective vehicle for promoting early literacy ability in children.

Make your kids sleep better:

There is a direct correlation between grades and the average amount of sleep. Prepare your kid for better sleep by putting them to bed early and creating a sleep-friendly environment.

Make them learn a foreign language:

There are certain cognitive advantages of learning a foreign language. A kid who is skilled at switching between two systems of speech, writing, and structure seems to have better multitasking skills, also known as the “juggling skill”.

Introduce them to open online courses:

Kids are definitely curious beyond measure and often parents don’t feel equipped enough to sate that curiosity. It is an economical way to make your kids learn and discover the things that interest them.

Teach your kid to play indoor games:

Playing indoor games like Chess, Jenga, Ludo, etc has led to an improvement of decision-making ability and problem-solving ability in a child. All the family members can participate and create rounds and reward the one who wins.

Engage your child in active conversations:

A stimulating home environment is pivotal to a child’s mental growth. Kaintal School, listed among the top ten schools in Patiala, proposes that engaging your child in lively conversations with challenging vocabulary helps them to put forward their opinion in a group of people. 

Source: unesco.org

Keep your Children Active During COVID-19

Regular physical activity of your kid benefits both his/her mind and body. It helps support healthy growth and development and reduce the risk of diseases. It further also improves mental health and can reduce the risk of depression and stabilizes the mind. Kaintal School, the best ICSE school in Patiala, recommends all the parents to encourage their children to do some basic exercises or sports activity according to their age. So how is it possible to get them staying active while exercising during COVID-19?

Try and reduce long periods of sitting

Whether it is for watching TV, or studying, or using social media or playing games online etc, reduce your kid’s sitting time by making them take short breaks of 15- 20 minutes. Tell them to simply stand up and stretch a little to help loosen the muscles or just walk up and down the staircase also seems like a good idea.

Set up a routine to be active every day

Planning a physical activity or an exercise break or simply by making them join an online class, can help set some time aside and build up a fitness routine. Try setting reminders for your kid on your phone or tell them to note this in their diary. This will ensure that they stick to the routine.

Participate with your kid 

Plan some physical activity to be active with your children with games at home, walks in the parks, or cycling can be a way the whole family can relax, do something together and stay active.

Set active goals for your kid and yourself

Let your kid set his own goals in completing certain exercises in terms of minutes, repetitions, etc, which sets a bit of challenge but is realistic with help of other family members and their motivation. Record your kid’s progress on weekly activity chart and reward him for something he values.

While it may seem lazy for your kid to get up and start exercising, Kaintal School, listed among the best schools in Patiala, suggests every parent to lead their children with an example and also start being physically active.

Source: who.int