Kids’ lives have become complicated in the last year since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Many have spent months at home, unable to go to school and learn in the conventional sense. Online learning is challenging for many children who need in-person contact with a teacher to learn effectively.
Dogs are great at supporting their human pack members, especially the little ones, during stressful times. However, they can play an even larger role in your child’s education. Here is how:
Language development
Dogs can play an essential role in helping children with language development and reading. Giving your dog a foreign language name can help children wrap their tongues around new sounds, preparing them for second language acquisition. The OurFitPets site offers readers a list of Norwegian dog names, including meanings to help you make the correct selection.
Dogs are also a patient audience for children who struggle with reading aloud or saying speeches. They are a perfect audience to practice on, which will build a child’s self-confidence to the point where they are no longer uncomfortable reading or speaking to others.
Life skills
A dog’s companionship teaches children several life skills they will need as they grow into adults. One of the first things a young child learns when interacting with a dog is compassion and empathy by being gentle with a canine and not hurting it.
Dog ownership also teaches children about responsibility as they learn to care for someone or something other than themselves. This might require them sacrificing what they want to do to care for a canine. Having a dog in their lives also enhances a child’s self-image as a loyal dog’s presence boosts it.
Dogs can also teach children about diversity as they come in different shapes, colors, and sizes. While they may differ, they are all canines deserving of love, care, and attention. What a wonderful lesson for a child to take into the classroom and use while socializing with peers.
These life skills apply to any student’s life and teach them the self-discipline necessary for academic achievement. They will cope in various social settings both while at school and as adults in their personal and professional lives.
Math
Parents can make a dog central to their child’s numeracy development. Toddlers can learn to count by calculating how many legs or eyes a dog has. Later on, you can get a child to count how many toenails there are on each foot and add the numbers together to get a total.
Dogs can teach children the difference between big and small, long and short, and high and low. These are vital mathematical concepts that they will apply in their math studies.
For older children, create math problems that center on a dog. For example, if a dog is fed a quarter cup of food twice a day, how many cups of food does it eat weekly? If there is a certain amount of dog food in a bag, how long will it last, given how much the dog eats each day?
Science and biology
A biological study of their dog might stimulate a child’s interest in finding out about the world of living things around them. Fascinating dog facts and traits of different breeds can be an exciting way to learn about biology.
Parents can even use a dog to teach their children about scientific concepts, like sound. A dog’s perception of sound is extremely sensitive, so they do not like loud sounds. Examine the idea of displacement when placing a dog in the bath. Discuss the properties of dog fur that make it water-resistant.