Teaching young kids are not as easy as you think. If you want to teach your child at home or run your own home tuition classes, you should have a unique approach to teaching LKG and UKG students.
If you are a mother and have questions like, how can I teach my lkg child at home? or, If you are working as a private tutor or want to start tuition at home, you must learn how to teach young kids if you want to become a successful tutor.
In this article, you will learn how to teach lkg and ukg students and make them feel relaxed and enjoy learning with interest and fun.
Young kids like lkg, ukg, and 1st standard students are not INTERESTED in books! Yes, you read it right.
Confused? Let me explain.
Young kids are attentive to visuals, not texts. When they see something colorful, bigger, and bolder things, they start taking an interest in it.
If you make them read some books, they will feel punished. However, If the kids have already gone through playschools or nursery classes, they might be at some level of understanding of books kind of stuff.
You should always try to bring interest in teaching. They will not be comfortable with you unless you are the child’s mother.
Even if they follow what you say, it will not be from their heart but only because of fear. And the saddest part is, you cant teach lkg and ukg students with fear.
So what is the solution?
How to teach lkg and ukg students in the tuition or at home?
By applying unique and practically effective approaches. Below are some of the most important approaches to teaching lkg and ukg students successfully.
- Stay calm and Patient
- Acceptance
- Be Personal
- Positive Communication
- Encouragement
- Appreciation & Motivation
- Rewarding
- Make learning a fun activity
Let us understand each approach in detail.
Note: All these approaches mentioned below are equally effective for students under 8-9 years.
Patience:
Patience is the most important aspect of teaching lkg and lkg students. Why? You are going to deal with KIDS!
And, kids at this age are not attentive and won’t follow orders or instructions easily.
You might feel irritated just because they don’t focus on what you say or teach. It is normal, and you should never get angry about this. You have to be very, very patient while teaching younger kids.
Patience is the first and foremost skill you need to learn before teaching kids. If you don’t have patience, based on my years of experience teaching many students, I can tell you that you can’t become a successful teacher or tutor.
Many moms are worried about how to teach UKG child at home or watch foolish videos on YouTube like how to teach lkg students at home, but the issue with them is that they don’t have patience.
They might have taught their kids when they were in playschool or nursery class, but the teaching ideas of the playschool or nursery class are different from LKG & UKG students.
Always try to be patient with young kids, and it will help you teach better.
Acceptance:
Acceptance is your perception of the kids. At first, you may perceive that the kid is not disciplined, mischievous, and not focused.
Accept that.
They are kids, not adults. Once you accept what they are, only then you can engage effectively with them. If you don’t accept them and keep trying to change them the hard way, they will not tolerate you for sure.
They will do everything possible to avoid you, and as a tutor, you will lose trust amongst the parents as dissatisfied parents spread the negativity about you in the best way possible.
If you teach your kid, you can easily understand this thing and co-relate with other kids.
Be Personal:
Many lkg and ukg students are introverts, especially if you are the new tutor for them. They won’t open up with you if you don’t make things comfortable for them.
Being personal helps you get easily connected with kids. Once the kids connect with you, they will open up to share their views with you.
If you ignore this approach, you have to suffer a lot teaching lkg and ukg students. Many home tutors who are working as a tutor under home tuition agencies, ignore this approach and can’t get desired results and the agencies drop them.
But, how do you get connected with them by being personal? It is simple. Talk with them.
Ask them what they like, which movies they watched, and which is their best cartoon character. Which color is their favorite? There are many questions to ask them to make them feel relaxed and comfortable with you.
If you, as a new tutor, this approach works great.
Always try to get an answer from them in a comfortable manner. If the kids don’t respond initially, don’t force them or investigate.
Another good practice is to sit along with them. If they are sitting on a carpet, you should not use the chair. Instead, sit with them on the same carpet and teach. This will remove the mental distance between you and the kids.
Keep the atmosphere light, and they will surely become familiar with you and start believing in you and trusting you.
It will become much easier for you when they get connected with you and enjoy your company.
Positive Communication:
Positive communication means you should clearly explain the good things and the bad things in the most comprehensive way.
Young kids are not capable of deciding many things as good or bad. Even they don’t realize what they are doing is appreciable or punishable.
Your role is to teach them the positive things they will memorize in their unconscious minds forever. Only academic teaching can’t help the overall growth of any kids at this age.
You can explain to them how to behave, how to talk, how to respect, and how to accept mistakes by demonstrating in front of them.
If you don’t demonstrate, they will feel hard to understand and, most importantly, not be interested in what you ask them to do.
Let me give you an example. When you teach students, use your hands to explain the topic, make expressions to visualize good and bad things, and use appropriate gestures to simplify the subject.
Kids will easily believe what you do, not what you tell them to do. Be an example and share positive things with them to engage them with you, and you will soon observe that the kids will start exploring themselves.
Encouragement:
How important is it to encourage kids? And how to encourage kids as a tutor or teacher?
Encouraging kids helps build their confidence. For example, if the kids want to draw some picture that is not possible for them at this stage, don’t stop them.
Let me test you with one scenario.
The kid has done the homework, but it is not finished as instructed by you. What will you do?
You will ask them why they haven’t done the homework and warn them not to keep the homework incomplete again.
Or maybe if you are a good teacher, you would have asked them to do the homework the next day.
But, there will be no encouragement for the kids.
What I was doing in my initial days, I used to take a notebook of a child and draw a smiley face with two eyes, a nose, and one ear with a color pen.
And then, I used to show it to the kid and told them that if they had completed the homework, the face would have both ears and looks more beautiful.
Believe me, every child with whom I have done this experiment never missed their homework unless and until there was a genuine reason.
They feel encouraged when you do such experiments with them.
Got my point?
Avoid criticizing kids; instead, encourage them to do better.
Appreciation & Motivation:
When kids receive appreciation from elders or teachers, they become happy and motivated to do much harder tasks or activities with interest.
Let me give you a simple example. Suppose you are teaching cursive writing, and a kid is trying hard to write in cursive letters, but somehow they cannot make it perfect.
You should never ask them to repeat it 100 times or tell them that this is bad writing.
Instead, first appreciate them by saying, “Wow, you are learning very fast. But here you should make this curve like this.” And then, you can hold their hand and show them how to write in cursive by moving your hands and pencils.
Let them do it by themselves again and again, and with practice, they will start writing cursive letters.
Let them have hands-on experience. Even if they don’t do it perfectly, appreciate them. Everyone loves appreciation, and kids are not different.
The only difference is that kids don’t recognize fake appreciation easily, and you should take benefit of that to motivate them.
Rewarding Students:
The reward doesn’t mean to be any material things or items. You can reward the child in many ways. For example, if the child achieves a small thing, you can first appreciate them and clap for them. You can also ask other kids to clap for them.
The clap is an emotional reward. Give some stars in their books when they do something good. But always tell them the reason behind the five stars.
Also, please do not give five stars every time. If they get five stars every time, there will be no more importance or charm of five stars. Let them climb the ladder of five stars by performing better.
You can use many ways to create rewards with your creativity. Remember, you should avoid physical things like chocolates or wafer packets.
My favorite and tested method is to use essential teacher planner stickers for rewarding students. These stickers helped me to boost the confidence in my students and they perform even better.
You can buy these essential stickers online from Amazon if you want to give it a try.
If you are teaching in a group, rewarding works great to ignite other students’ enthusiasm; however, you should not focus only on the student who is performing better than others. Because if you do this, the others will feel demotivated. Try to engage all kids with different approaches.
Make Learning A Fun Activity:
Learning for young kids is an experience of starting an academic phase of their life. You should include fun and interest in your teaching.
How to teach lkg and ukg students with fun?
Young kids are not athletes who need difficult practices. LKG & UKG students need to be treated politely and in the simplest way possible.
You have to be with them. When you teach rhymes, sing them and explain and then sing along with the kids. This will improve their comprehension ability as well as improve their listening skills.
You can include activities related to the topic. For example, if you are teaching basic words to the kids, you can arrange old newspapers and distribute them among the kids.
Now ask them to find the words and circle them.
I guarantee you that they will learn in a much faster way with great fun. They will start recognizing the words easily.
The reason behind it is a photographic memory. Photographic memory is the strongest among kids, and you should always use this natural power that is already with them to make them get better at learning.
You can refer lkg class worksheet to get more ideas on this. There are many lkg class activities and ukg class activities available on the internet that have fun learning methodologies. You can search and try to include those activities in your teaching.
You can also use my worksheets which will help you a lot. You can buy my worksheets at the lowest cost if you wish.
You can use visual aids in your teaching.
Visual aids are charts, picture books, maps, drawing, photographs, video clips, science kits, and everything that speak the information itself.
All these visual aids are highly effective in teaching and help kids build strong recognition ability with a clear understanding of the topic.
Conclusion on how to teach LKG & UKG students:
I hope that now you have understood various approaches to teach the younger kids and apply all the learning in your teaching.
If you are running your home tuition business or a private tutor, you will be rewarded with popularity, reputation, credibility, and more students if you follow these approaches.
Every child is gifted, talented, and special in one way or another. Appreciate these qualities in them and bring out the best in them with innovative teaching methods.
Now, it’s your turn.
If you have any interesting story of a unique teaching method that you are already applying, you can comment below, and if it is helpful to our readers, I will include it in this article with your name.
I wish you the best in teaching kids!
Thankyou So Much for Given Such kind of Perspective 💝!!
Thank you, Pratiksha!