Lessons in Everything

Tweet I was playing Zoo World on Facebook today and came across an interesting post by one of the other players. She said she was playing the game and her daughter was learning about all the animals.

This is a smart mother. She gets to have the fun of playing the game and also gets to turn it into an educational lesson for her daughter. I don't know if she home schools or not, but she is doing the very thing that makes any parent or teacher a great educator. She has learned that every activity can be turned into an opportunity for learning.

Opportunities like this present themselves all the time. Parents and teachers just need to learn how to take advantage of them. A trip to the grocery store can be turned into a lesson about comparison shopping. The insurance commercial on television can be the start of a discussion about the importance of insurance and the different types of insurance a person should have. That picture of grandma can be turned into a history lesson about the year she was born; mine was born just before the Wright brothers made their historic flight. Grandpa's old army uniform can lead to a quick lesson about WWII (or whatever war grandpa may have been a part of). Microwaving lunch can lead to discussions of waves, everything from radio waves to x-rays. The box of cereal can be a lesson about nutrition, calories, daily values, or percents.

Everything can be a learning opportunity. If a child learns to think this way, then he or she will always see the value of an education, because everything will be educational.