I liked learning as a kid. It took me a long long time to learn to read, but I did learn. My parents bought me a Radio Shack science pack, I learned to make a crystal radio on it and a lot of other things. I even had a Microscope and a telescope as a kid.

Checkers, chess, card games, all of them are a form of learning. 

I struggled to learn to read for a long time, I was actually able to crochet granny squares before I was able to read. I mention that because that is what got me to finally understand how to read. I wanted to make things other than squares, so I learned how to read patterns, and then how to read books.

The importance of parents teaching their kids can never be understated. It brings family bonding and fun at the same time. Learning to play go fish was fun, then UNO and poker, and a lot of other things. People think board games are just fun, but they teach counting and strategy and other skills that are used later in life.

I think playing boardgames are a great way to teach and learn. Especially Monopoly which teaches counting and the value of money. Just need to be very very patient as the game slows to a crawl, but once they figure it out, the game clicks all of a sudden.

My daughter is keen to learn chess, but I am horrible at it.....so learning from me may not be ideal. Maybe I should get her to watch the Queen's Gambit.

Well said!

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> I thought we could have something she hasn't tried before to eat, fresh mangoes.

Now that you mention it I think that I also haven't tried mangoes yet.

>For us at least, the time we spend together doing these things is not lesson time, it is quality time, and Smallsteps laps it up, she loves it.

Quality time is the real thing and that's what parenting really is . Here people have reduced parenting to just provide a child's material needs and push the academic needs of the child to the class teacher from a personal experience as a teacher, children who spend quality time with parents are smarter articulates very properly.
Kids are attached so much to their mothers but never worry they love daddy so much.

>And, I believe that learning these processes in the formative and younger ages, affects the ability to both learn and apply them in the future.

It is a very essential point of view that you have conveyed, Mr @tarazkp. Unfortunately, not many parents share your views.

I totally agree with you that the ability to learn and apply what is learned is the essence of the learning process.

How many times have I encountered people who have high academic grades (due to rote learning), but when it comes to dealing with the real world (I mean, the world of work), some of them fail and today appear ordinary.

I have experienced what Smallsteps experienced from my father. I was forced to apply what I learned by drawing lines on the board he was going to cut to make a table. He taught me the science of calculating angles, and when I was in school, I got perfect scores in math because of "lessons" from my father. *Learning is fun in a different way.*

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Learning as a kid, for me, was way far from fun. And I think this is because I was taught to learn to pass tests, and not learn to get along with the intricacies of dealing with life. So, I often hated going to school. I wasn't even the playful type of person, so there wasn't much I enjoyed going to school for.

Overtime, I began to do poorly. Learning was meant to be fun; it can be. But the fact that so much attention was paid to my grades and not what I actually knew just looked more like work at that age for me.

If only people didn't make learning seem "not fun" and actually let kids learn the right way, i.e., by thinking for themselves, then maybe the world would be a better place as we would have more thinkers rather than characters in a game.

It's a good thing Smallshops is different. It'll all get easier in the future and be beneficial for you both as parents as she'll have her own voice.

PS: Has she now tasted the mangoes? What does she think?
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> people connect consumer entertainment as fun, and learning as not fun

I find this is generally what happens when people think that school is the only way to "learn" anything.

Even my youngest is falling for it.  He was desperate to go to school (and may still well be but I haven't heard anything about it for a while) because he got convinced that he was "missing the basics" and hadn't been learning anything the entire time we'd been homeschooling (because it's mostly been fun with long bouts of downtime where they do their own thing).  I asked him what he thought the "basics" were and most of the stuff he was rattling off were high school level things which were not only easy enough for at least one of us to teach, but that he was also actually actively avoiding when we were trying to teach it in roundabout ways or in ways that are interesting to them (how I do most things).

Meanwhile ask him anything about any of his topics of interest and well I don't know why he asks me anything really xD though what I can do for anyone interested is break it down into Educationese XP

>Smallsteps loves her Mummy more.

Are you sure? I think daughters love dad much more. Perhaps, this will change when she has reached her adolescent :)