Knowledge in the Gurdwara

• Children don’t listen!
• How can I make my children learn Punjabi ?
• Parents don’t bring up their children in Sikhi.
• etc..

Here are some of the comments we hear at home, in the Gurdwara or in the society. Everybody says children should learn Punjabi and we should do something about it. We are all trying hit and miss approaches to this problem with varying degree of success. Now its time to share our experiences and come up with a proper teaching method suitable for our culture.

How can we encourage children to show interest in learning Punjabi. According to experienced teachers like Santokh Singh Sidhu from UK who is a Trainer (Law & Languages) for over 35 years ;

I am a great believer in taking the Learner from the ‘Known to Unknown to enhance understanding’
In UK & West the children learn Nursery Rhymes during their early developments. If new topics can be linked to their ‘Knowns’ then ‘Unknown’ is easy to follow. I tried this method at the Punjabi School, Leeds Gurdwara and it worked.

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Stages of Intellectual Development

Jean Piaget may be best known for his stages of cognitive development. Piaget discovered that children think and reason differently at different periods in their lives. He believed that everyone passed through an invariant sequence of four qualitatively distinct stages. Invariant means that a person cannot skip stages or reorder them. Although every normal child passes through the stages in exactly the same order, there is some variability in the ages at which children attain each stage. The four stages are:
sensorimotor – birth to 2 years;
preoperational – 2 years to 7 years;
concrete operational – 7 years to 11 years; and
formal operational (abstract thinking) – 11 years and up.
Each stage has major cognitive tasks which must be accomplished. In the sensorimotor stage, the mental structures are mainly concerned with the mastery of concrete objects. The mastery of symbols takes place in the preoperational stage. In the concrete stage, children learn mastery of classes, relations, and numbers and how to reason. The last stage deals with the mastery of thought (Evans, 1973).
Jean Piaget – Intellectual Development

Please share with us your successful methods/ideas and lets try to find a concrete solution to this problem.