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- Photo: Helen's Place LLC, Dallas, TX
Helen’s Place LLC Update October 1, 2022
When children are young, they learn best with constant, positive reinforcement from parents, family, and teachers to help them overcome their fear of separation.
After that, they might be rewarded for their good behavior by having stars added by their names on drawings, or receive prizes of food or trinkets that might delight them.
As time goes on, the learning focus shifts from behaving nicely to showing independence, which is part of children’s education into responsible, successful adults in American society.
Children achieve the greatest success when they discover the things that inspire them to feel intrinsically motivated, rather than depending on external, rewards-based feedback.
They learn that people benefit from keeping a special journal or notebook to collect their stories, poems, written lyrics to songs, and/or drawings, in order to see their progress over time.
Sometimes marking a journal’s cover with an iconic picture and/or slogan, like a picture of a bird or a slogan like, “When you learn about birds, you discover yourself,” (used by Helen’s Place LLC), can inspire children to get started, and lead to a lifetime of learning.
What appears to be true is – that which becomes part of the memories within a person’s brain, becomes part of their emotional fitness and can lead to better outcomes, because happiness isn’t based on external factors.
People may disappoint you, but your personal interests never will. When things go wrong and you’ve suffered a loss or defeat, you always have this to fall back on.
These days, teachers and parents are so busy just trying to teach children the basic skills like reading, writing, math, and functional independence, that they overlook methods or taking the time to teach intrinsic motivation skills.
This is a missed opportunity, because people need these skills the most to cope with the complicated, disinformation age we live in.
Suggestions for fostering intrinsic motivation:
- Expose children to a variety of subjects and learning experiences, and notice what interests them or doesn’t. If a child loses interest, be willing to move on with them.
- Help children start over, so never look down on their blank page, or try to fill it up again too fast.
- Help children know that it’s not necessary to be busy all the time; in fact we all need time to clear our mind and make free space available before starting something new.
- When interests are known, give children time every day to do those things.
- When children are old enough to draw pictures, put magic markers in their hands, watercolors, or fingerpaints and let them draw before they can talk.
- Help children label their drawings until they’re able to write their own labels.
- At the age of around seven, help children move from loose drawings to notebooks or journals, where they can continue to record what interests them.
- Help children do these intrinsically motivating tasks, until they attain intrinsic motivation to keep the record of their life and interests going in pictures and words, including writing down stories and happenings.
Related audio/video recording:
Song demonstrating intrinsic motivation through the love of birds that inspired this song.
YouTube, 2010, The Tallest Man on Earth, “A Field of Birds (Live on KEXP)”
Additional Transcript:
Helen’s Place LLC, September 30, 2022, “Song Lyrics to ‘Field of Birds’”
Helen’s Place LLC in Dallas, TX is the maker of printed instructional, educational, and teaching materials for children and adults in the field of English Language Arts and Cognitive Science.
Your comments are greatly appreciated. Send them to Helen’s Place LLC via email to info@helensplacenet.com. We’re always interested in learning more about you and the issues that are important to you.
