THE 3 THINGS WE BELIEVE IN AT SATURDAY KIDS

We continually strive to inspire a generation of kids to become curious, self-directed learners, and there’s no way we can do this without all the parents who believe in the same cause and are willing to go the extra mile with us. It’s gratifying when they say they identify with what we stand for and they’re glad their kids have such opportunities these days. We most recently spoke to a Saturday Kids parent, Veron and were glad to know that her son loved his class with us.

“Adam enjoyed himself immensely throughout the 5 days camp. He requested to reach class earlier and when he was home, he continued working on his coding projects after dinner. I’ve never seen him so serious about anything before. He has signed up for weekly classes in Jan 2019. “

There are many reasons why we do what we do but here are the top 3:

“It’s fine to fail, but just don’t bail.”

The idea of failure, or more specifically, learning to deal with failure, is an important conversation for us at Saturday Kids. Failure isn’t a dirty word, and it’s not something we should run away from. Failure is a part of our everyday life and we believe it’s important to teach kids, or rather show them, how to approach it and move past it, rather than avoid it completely (an impossible task anyway and one doomed to failure, ha).

Saturday Kids parent Veron agrees –

“I like that Saturday Kids encourages kids to learn and that it’s okay to fail in the process of learning. When I looked at the SK website, I saw that part of your mission was to get kids to learn to deal with failure. I found that all the other schools were about coding and obsessed with just results but I really loved that SK talked about the process of learning, failure, and learning to move past that because that’s a very important lesson for kids.”

Here’s a recent piece Victoria Yim from the Bright Life shared on our blog. She speaks on failure and how we can encourage our kids to embrace their failures in a healthy way. It’s something that deeply resonates with us and we hope that it does the same for you too.

Kids learn better when they have fun.

This is again something we’ve talked about a fair bit. Our founder/CEO John shared his thoughts on this while he was at ISTE earlier this year. Check it out here. To recap:

Play is one of the core principles at Saturday Kids. We believe learning should feel like play. What does play in this context mean? Not just laughter and having fun (although that is an important part of play). Not just the activity. It’s the attitude of testing, experimenting and trying, which leads us to two other core principles at Saturday Kids. Learning happens by doing. Failure is reframed as iteration. Play underpins everything we do at Saturday Kids. Our goal is to make learning fun again so kids enjoy the process instead of just focusing on the outcome. When kids enjoy learning, they become self-motivated learners and our job as educators is pretty much done.

Veron was amazed that her son Adam would insist on coming early for his holiday camp classes, “Whenever I send him for enrichment classes, he’s usually quite unfocused and doesn’t really enjoy it but when it came to coding classes, it’s the only one he thoroughly enjoyed. He requested to go early everyday on all 5 days of the camp and troubleshoot his project. He really enjoyed the classes because he was having fun and he’s asked me to sign him up for weekly classes now as well.”

Learn to code, code to learn

Coding is a great skill to have, especially in this day and age. We encourage every kid to pick up a bit of coding because it’s a relevant skill to have – but don’t pick up coding for the sake of coding or for the sake of learning something new. We see coding as one of many, many ways to get your kids curious about the world around them. The big question we ask ourselves at Saturday Kids everyday: What if kids are intrinsically motivated to learn? We can’t teach kids everything there is to know but what we can do is encourage them to look at problems and think, “I can figure this out myself”.

Saturday Kids learn how to learn.

No lectures. No memorisation. No ONE right answer. Like real life, we’re all about trying things out yourself, failing, figuring what went wrong and trying again. These are the skills and mindset that will last a lifetime and how we learn in real life. Let’s get kids to learn how to learn. Because the kids who learn to learn become curious, inventive, resourceful human beings who solve real world problems to make a meaningful impact.