Learn at what age you should expect that your child can practice skills without prompting and strategies for encouraging your child to practice tasks they don’t like doing.
Learn
Getting your child to ‘practice’ anything is hard. As a parent and professional speech therapist who needs to encourage her students to practice mundane exercises to support their learning, I completely relate.
Understanding the age at which your child starts to practice can help you create more effective learning activities for your child.
Research proves that children only begin deliberately practicing at age 6.
- Age 4 – Children can neither grasp the reason for the practice, nor are they likely able to sustain attention on the activity.
- Age 5 – Children can’t quite grasp the reason for the practice – yet.
- Around age 6 or 7 – Children can understand the concept of ‘practice’.
Do
Core Marbles
- Make practice doable with frequent short sessions.
- Embed the practice into your daily routine so that it is not a struggle or a bargaining exercise, especially for younger children who do not yet conceptualize practicing to improve a skill.
For younger children, set up practice as part of their daily routine without counting on them to be intrinsically motivated. With a few minutes of consistent practice (e.g., 3 – 5 minutes) several times a week, motor learning will happen and change can occur.
‘3 – 5 minutes’ aren’t magic numbers, and there isn’t a specific number that is true for all skills. But it is true that frequent short practice sessions are more effective than infrequent long practice sessions. Make practice doable.
This could be a few minutes before dessert, story time, brushing teeth, screen time, etc. – whatever works for your family’s schedule. This concept applies to many activities – handwriting, articulation, reading, learning a musical instrument, etc.
Your child may not care – yet – to ‘practice’. Keep working at building a growth mindset and normalizing mistakes. Progress will happen.