Short lessons win, and it is not because of attention spans
Every lesson on LearningKid is under fifteen minutes. The reason has less to do with focus than with how stopping works.
Sneha IyerChildren’s author and illustrator
Short lessons win, and it is not because of attention spans
The usual explanation for short lessons is that children cannot concentrate for long. That is mostly wrong: a seven-year-old building something they care about will happily lose an hour to it.
The real argument is about stopping points. A long lesson has one natural place to stop — the end. Miss it, and the child stops somewhere arbitrary, loses the thread, and comes back to a video they have to re-watch to make sense of.
Short lessons put the stopping point where the idea ends. Coming back means starting the next thing, not re-finding your place in the last one.
3 responses
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Sign in- Sneha IyerAuthor
This matched what we saw at home almost exactly. Thank you for writing it down.
Aanya 718hlh53This matched what we saw at home almost exactly. Thank you for writing it down.
- Sneha IyerAuthor
We tried the cabbage one this weekend. The kitchen survived, and my daughter has not stopped talking about pH.
