Cards
Ask your child to turn into an examiner and prepare index cards with important questions. Key points for the answer can be given on the back of the cards. For example, for a chapter on Indian geography, the index card will have questions like "What is a delta?" The back will have keywords like river.
Charts
Flowcharts help in learning cause and effect. For example, here is how you can make your child understand "rainfall". Draw a series of boxes from the top to the bottom with words like sea, heating up, water vapor, cloud, precipitation and then finally rain. All boxes will be linked by arrows to show "what leads to what".
Years
History involves a lot of learning by rote, and children often find it difficult to remember the year in which certain events took place. It is a good idea to have flash cards for years as well. Alternatively, every time your child finishes a chapter, write down all the important dates on a chart paper, and stick it to your child's bulletin board. Keep adding more and more dates to this chart, and keep quizzing your child until the dates are ingrained in his memory.
Acronyms
Acronyms work like a charm and will help your child remember sequences and mathematical formula. BODMAS (bracket, order, division, multiplication, addition and subtraction) is a popular acronym in maths. Your daughter can invent her own acronyms to remember points of an answer.
Acrostics
Acrostic is something you might have never heard of but actually practiced. It is a small sentence where first letter of each word is the hint for the answer. My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets is a well-known acrostic for the solar system.
Linking words
Try and link words as much as possible. For example, the word "photosynthesis" can be explained by linking the word photo to a flash or light. So light (sun) helps plants make their own food, and this process is called photosynthesis. He will never forget the meaning for the rest of his life!
Play
Don't stop your child from playing or watching television. Play is a teacher too. Shraddha has an eight-year old son Gautam who didn't understand the concept of time too well. She fixed his playstation slot for a limited time duration of 45 minutes. Gautum goes to bed at 9 p.m. So, now he knows that he has to start playing at 8:15 p.m to utilize his 45 minute game time!
Games, too, teach a lot about winning and losing, strategy (Chess), vocabulary (Scrabble), and general knowledge board games abound.
Television
Shakespeare's plays are taught in schools now. But do you think they were considered educational material in the Bard's time? No, they were pure entertainment.
Did you know the famous Batman villain Mr. Freeze? Well, he was actually a mad scientist who spilt some cryogenic chemicals on himself. So, he needed sub-zero temperatures to survive. That's science at play!
Similarly, there are various channels like Discovery and Animal Planet that are educative. Encourage your child to watch the news by discussing news events at home. There is something to be said for discouraging mindless entertainment like some television soaps, but television viewing can be turned into a positive experience if you monitor what your child watches.
