How Children Learn When They Have a Need
My blog needs a new template. My daughter Sophie says, “I’ll help you find one, Mum.” So we spend hours with our eyes glued to our computer screens searching template websites.
“What about this one, Mum?” says Sophie, turning her computer screen to face me.
“That might work,” I reply.
Soon Sophie has installed the template on my blog.
“What do you think?”
I take a look and then say, “I don’t like how all the photos of a blog post are tiled together to make one preview thumbnail.”
“No problem,” says Sophie. “I’ll look for something else.”
Hours later, our heads are aching and we’re no nearer finding the perfect template. “I’m really sorry for wasting your time,” I say to Sophie. “Let’s give up. I can just leave my blog as it is for now.”
“No, this is important. I’ll find something suitable if I keep looking.”
So the big perfect template search continues.
Eventually, I point to a design. “This one will do. It’s almost perfect. It doesn’t have a footer column, but I’ll have to do without one.”
So Sophie installs the template on my blog. And then she says, “I think I could adjust this template. I might be able to make a footer column for you.” She dives into the HTML code and a few minutes later, she says, “Look! I did it!”
I now have an attractive new blog design that includes a footer column. I’m happy. I move all my labels – there are a lot of them – into the newly created footer space. Perfect!
I then look at my welcome message. It’s in my sidebar, taking up a lot of room. I move it into the main part of my blog and place it above my recent blog posts. I like what I’ve done. Until I discover a problem.
“My welcome message is showing up on every single page of my blog,” I tell Sophie. “I’ll have to move it back to the sidebar.”
“No, don’t do that, Mum. I can fix it for you. I just need to add a bit of code.”
A couple of minutes later, my welcome message is only visible on the home page of my blog.
If Sophie can create footer columns and restrict welcome messages to my home page, perhaps she can make other changes to my template. I tell her what I want and she gets to work. It’s not long before my blog template is exactly what I’d been looking for. It’s perfect.
“When did you learn how to adjust blog templates?” I ask. “How did you know what to do?”
“Don’t you remember that coding course I did, Mum?” says Sophie. “It’s good to know about coding if you’re a blogger. That’s why I learnt it. I need to know how to change the HTML code on my photography blog.”
I’m a blogger and I’m fussy about my blog’s design. Perhaps I need to know HTML coding too. I should finish that HTML course I started a long time ago. But I won’t. You see, I don’t really have a need. I have Sophie. She helps me. But if she wasn’t here, I just might be motivated to learn something I’m not really passionate about.
Children will learn when they have a need. And that’s just what Sophie did.
I spoke about Sophie and her fantastic HTML coding help in this week’s podcast, Ep 78: Go Out There and Make a Difference! I wonder if I told the story better in written words or spoken ones. What do you think?