What to do when school work is "boring" or "too easy”

“Boring” work as an adult is manageable. We’re all conditioned to understand that sometimes boring things just need to get done, even when those things are part of careers or hobbies that we’re passionate about. A little grind here and there is standard and expected. We don’t always get to do new and exciting things all the time.

For a child, “boring” can completely derail areas of interest. This can be counter-intuitive when the reason for it being such a grind can simply be because they’re good at it. 

It’s easy to fall into the mindset of “why can’t their teacher just give them harder work?”. I’m guilty of this too, but in a lot of cases they can't, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Repetition is important for long term memory. It improves our recall. When you start to think about “boring” and “easy” work as an advantage for embedding information, the focus shifts from “They need harder work” into “How can we make easy work fun?”

The obvious method: Gamification.

My son excels in mathematics. He’s only 6 and understands division, multiplication & square roots. I’m a professional programmer. He enjoys trying to understand my code and logic, even attempting to write his own functions. So it's no surprise, his “boring” and “easy” is grinding out simple addition.

But like i mentioned, while it may be “easy” and “boring”, it’s still extremely important to embed it into long term memory.

My secret weapon is dice.

I bought a set of Dungeons & Dragons Dice. There are 7 die with varying sides. 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 & 20. Before bedtime we make up random and silly games to play. The key here is to make the core mechanics of the game include adding up the values of the dice, and tallying scores. Anything else is limited to your imagination. Make up rules. Let them make up rules. 

Now simple addition can be fun, an exciting hurdle to getting points on the board. Now grinding it out at school doesn’t feel as boring, as they start to associate it more with the games they can invent.

While it’s a good idea to encourage progression and expose them to harder concepts than they receive at school to keep them interested, it’s equally important to make the boring stuff fun.