The family, with the biological inheritance it bestows upon children, and the extensive time it spends daily with them in conversation, interaction, movement, informational and behavioral guidance, and nutrition, is the most important factor influencing children’s learning, more so than school, peers, and the various daily societal situations. The family environment is, in fact, the vital sphere in which children’s personalities, intelligence, language, learning, and futures are shaped during the first twelve years of their tender lives.
The extensive time children spend daily with family members and in the family environment, especially from birth until the age of twelve, is much longer than what they spend in school! The family bears moral, cognitive, nutritional, social, and behavioral burdens, which must be met in a manner that is appropriate to their needs. Otherwise, the family itself is undoubtedly responsible for their learning deficits and the weakness of their future.
While families genetically provide their children with a general 70% of their physical, personality, cognitive, and intellectual characteristics, as psychological literature indicates, providing them with these characteristics during the first twelve years of their lives—a purposeful, organized family environment rich in knowledge, nutrition, housing, clothing, affection, and social and moral values, 24 hours a day—unquestionably makes them the most important and decisive social factor for children/students’ learning and the development of their personalities and futures.
Eight Basic Principles for Effective Learning Environments for Children
Families can not only enhance children’s learning by observing the following eight principles, but also make these learning experiences and activities effective and rich in responding to their developmental and future needs, to the best of their ability, given the current circumstances, time, and place. We briefly explain these eight principles as follows:
1. Consider learning opportunities enjoyable and vital to the family and family life. If the family does not desire learning or views it as a burdensome duty, it is expected that they will not initiate it with their children. Nothing is more harmful to learning than negative human emotions.
2. Consider play the primary and ideal means of learning, without direct instruction and teaching. The desire for play, its behaviors, and attitudes are deeply rooted in human nature and human needs, especially in children, much more so than formal, restrictive, and dictating learning situations. Hence, the design and implementation of learning opportunities in the form of cognitive and motor play activities and experiences is an indicator of their personal and environmental effectiveness in learning. Here, if the education is related to the Arabic alphabet, for example, learning it from children using clay letters that the children themselves form is faster and more effective than learning it directly from their mother or teacher using the written method of pen and paper.
3- General awareness of things fosters children’s learning. Children’s attention to the presence of things around them helps them absorb them deeply into their cognitive memory. Similarly, the more children are familiar with learning experiences and situations, partially or completely, in the environment, the easier/faster their understanding of those learning experiences.
4- Focus on children’s learning of concepts, experiences, and objects, without testing their level of acquisition, especially at the preschool age, when their verbal expression abilities are generally limited. We advise families here to provide unlimited learning situations both within and outside the family, and to allow children to freely express what they have learned, as encouraged or permitted by family or normal life opportunities. Never expose them to testing situations that force them to provide answers to this learning.
5- Enrich and diversify the family environment whenever possible, both financially and educationally. The diverse family assets, including books, collectibles, ornamental plants, equipment, computers, printers, the internet, satellite television, and home spaces for sitting, relaxing, sleeping, thinking, and contemplating, all provide diverse and numerous spontaneous learning opportunities, sometimes beyond the family’s awareness and education. According to behavioral psychology, a diverse family environment rich in its components provides children with rich and numerous stimuli that encourage them to respond to them and learn diversely as a result.
6. A family’s positive attitude toward children and learning, along with appropriate rewards for their activities, leads to their maximum learning potential. The family’s unconditional love for children, their warmth, their attention, and their appropriate reinforcement of their behavior and achievements, in terms of quality, quantity, and timing, make them role models for them. This motivates them to embrace learning and exert maximum effort to acquire the required knowledge and experience.
7. Practicing fun combined with visualization and contemplation in children’s education. This approach is an effective way to activate cell function, improve sensory, short-term, and long-term memory systems, and achieve the desired learning. Serious expressions accompanied by frowns and formality discourage children’s learning and foster a sense of resistance and disregard for learning messages from both family and teachers.
8. Providing some ambiguity and novelty in learning tasks and activities to stimulate children’s intellectual curiosity and a desire to explore the unknown and achieve learning. For the family, this means raising learning requirements to a level slightly higher than the children’s abilities and the types of knowledge and experiences they already possess. Providing children with experiences that are slightly more challenging (rather than easier or more challenging than they are capable of) is a scientific principle for fostering learning, its occurrence, and children’s perseverance, without boredom or a weakening of desire and will.
Family Creation of Effective Learning Environments for Children/Students
There are no magic formulas, nor do they require imaginary financial capabilities to create effective learning environments for children/students. All that is required here is:
1. The family’s genuine desire to transform the family environment from a routine, inactive space for sitting and watching television, eating, and sleeping, to a lively, active one that encourages family members to interact with each other, experiment, exchange opinions, understand each other’s needs, emotions, and ambitions, inquire about what interests them, and engage in free, open-ended study and learning.
2. Administrative sufficiency of the family’s resources and expenditures. If it is necessary for the family to purchase a computer and printer for the children, then they should consider purchasing a $200 device instead of a $2,000 one, and a $30-$40 dot matrix printer instead of a $400 digital one. The decisive factor in building effective family learning environments is not money, but rather good management and innate nurturing of children’s development.
3. Perseverance in enriching the components of the family environment and renewing its organizational and operational methods within the home to stimulate children’s curiosity and enhance learning opportunities.
In any case, families can transform the ordinary home environment into an effective learning environment by providing the following materials and equipment:
1. A relatively large wall map of the world—detailed, colorful, and legible.
2. A relatively large globe of the world, placed in a special corner visible to the children. They can stand on it, read its various information, and rotate it left and right to obtain the required knowledge.
3. A microscope to view and magnify fine specimens.
4. Handheld lenses for magnifying written text, shapes, and legible images.
5. Samples of ancient and modern coins, stamps, soil, rocks, dried and stuffed animals (whenever possible).
6. Arabic-English-French dictionaries and vice versa.
7. Various artificial models, ranging from fruits and vegetables to body systems, animals, and birds (whenever possible for the family financially and at home).
8. A diverse children’s library, including meaningful stories and resources based on images and drawings of countries, people, plants, and animals.
9. A regular library for adult children, especially those in the intermediate stage and above, to enrich their knowledge and stimulate their curiosity.
10. A computer connected to the internet and equipped with various software and other accessories.