When Your Child is a Digital Learner | #tech #technology

Reports cards made their way into our hands last week, and for the most part, the kiddos had pretty good grades.  The Teenager’s grades were all passing which is a miracle since she’s missed 20 days this year so for due to all of her broken bones.  The Entertainer… well, soon, we’ll be changing his name to “The Genius”.  The Gamer had passing grades, but his Language Arts grade is pretty low because he is just not a fan of sitting and reading books.

In our school district, we have a program called Accelerated Reader and to make a long story short, kids read books which are assigned a number of points based on the difficulty of the book, and they take a test on the computer when they’ve read it.  The points are then converted to grades and they’re even awarded prizes for so many points.  It’s a neat system, but for some reason, The Gamer absolutely hates it.   The test part isn’t that big of a deal to him because he loves to do anything computer or tech related, but if you put a paperback book in his hands, he just isn’t really having it.

He gets it honest, though, because (sadly) I’m not that big of a reader, and I also love technology.  Last year, we tried downloading a few books on the Kindle, but with the amount of books they have to read, that can become quite expensive!  It’s not that he can’t read, because we know he can, it’s just that he doesn’t like it unless it’s attached to a computer or gaming system!  When we used to homeschool him, he preferred to read and learn on the computer with sites like Cram.com which allows you to navigate through digital flashcards using the keyboard. He really thrives better learning in digital format.

Next year, he will be in middle school, and I think he will enjoy learning more, because in our district, they’re issued Chromebooks at that level.  Until then, we’re just trying to keep him interested in learning any way we can.  We’re possibly even looking into getting him a laptop of his own for Christmas, if for nothing else, to give him something to look forward to for trucking through and keeping his grades up in the format on the elementary level.

How do you keep your kids interested in learning?