Obstacle Route

I kept writing about non-formal education and also about some methods that teachers can use in order for the students to learn with pleasure. I do it because after so many years spent on school and in the academical environment, I realized how the whole formal education made me to enjoy less and less studying. I mean, I love studying, I always did it and I think that we study and we learn all the time, but the system is the problem. Because, at least, in my case, at some point, I ended up studying just for the grades or in order to pass the subjects at University, but not so much for gaining more information.

I spent so many hours learning so many equations and their demonstrations, but if you ask me now about them, I will probably remember some of the equations, but the demonstrations? For sure not. If I see them again, I will remember the connections that I made in order to understand and to be able to reproduce it for the exam, but that’s it. But the studying itself it is an amazing thing to do. And I think it is very important for students to learn with pleasure and to have the curiosity to discover more and more.

And since the passion for studying should be developed from a young age, I would like to present today another method, Obstacle Route that has as target group kids from kindergarten, primary and secondary school, but also kids with mental disability or hearing impaired.

This method has as purposes physical and children’s skills development and to identify various shapes, letters, numbers and to learn to wait. The number of participants is between 1 and 10 and it lasts 20-30 minutes. As materials, we need chairs, tables, chalk, plastic bottles, ropes or anything else that can be used as obstacles.

What you have to do is to put on the floor the materials needed in order to use them as obstacles and to create a route that the children will have to pass through. Before each obstacle, write some numbers and letters, in order for the children to identify them and to say out loud the numbers and the letters before passing through the next one. Of course, depending on the abilities, the obstacles can be easier or more difficult.

Children learn easily, but for them, all the activities have to be presented as games, in order to get the children’s attention.