How to Use Play to Boost Your Child’s Learning and Motivation at School

When School Feels Like a Battle

Every evening feels the same. You sit at the kitchen table with your child, a workbook open in front of you, and a familiar tension building in the air. Your child squirms, frowns, or zones out—and your patience wears thin. You’re not alone. Countless parents find themselves trying to help their children aged 6 to 12 who are stuck in a cycle of struggle, stress, and resistance when it comes to schoolwork.

So what if the problem isn’t the subject matter, but the way it’s being delivered? What if your child doesn't resist learning, but simply the way it's packaged? Play—real, joyful, imaginative play—may be the missing link.

Why Play Isn’t a Waste of Time—It’s Essential

Let’s dispel a common myth: play isn’t a break from learning. It's how children make sense of the world. When a child plays, they apply logic, test boundaries, solve problems, and explore emotions. In fact, curiosity—that essential engine of learning—is most active during play.

More than just fun, play creates an emotional connection to knowledge. And when children feel something, they remember it. Entering the world of numbers through a fantasy quest or exploring geography as a detective doubles the engagement and halves the resistance.

Meet Your Child Where They Are—Then Invite Them In

Children don’t all learn in the same way. Some need movement. Others need story. Others still need sound or repetition. If your child struggles with standard methods—reading from a book or silently completing worksheets—it might be time to reframe “homework” as “playwork.”

For instance, imagine your child hears their science lesson transformed into an audio adventure where they are the main character, exploring volcanoes while dodging lava. That shift from passive reader to active hero sparks excitement. This is something parents are doing with the help of learning tools like the Skuli App, which can convert written lessons into personalized stories using your child’s first name. Suddenly, learning becomes personal—and fun.

Turning Everyday Moments Into Playful Lessons

Once you start thinking playfully, opportunities hide in plain sight:

• Grocery store math: Ask your child to calculate the total cost of three items—or what the discount will be on their favorite cereal.
• Story-based spelling: Instead of rote writing, ask your child to make up a story using their spelling words. The sillier, the better.
• Dinner table trivia: Turn memorization into a quiz game. Use homemade flash cards, or better yet, snap a photo of their class notes and use digital tools to generate a quiz they can play over dinner.

Turning learning into a game isn’t just a trick—it’s a strategy rooted in neuroscience. Positive emotions enhance memory. Gamifying knowledge helps it stick.

What Happens When Play Enters the Equation

Nina, a mom of two, shared how her 10-year-old son dreaded reading... until she turned it into a game of voices. Each character had a different accent, and soon he was reading aloud with joy. Another parent shared how using audio lessons during car rides helped their daughter with dyslexia grasp spelling rules she had otherwise resisted.

These are small shifts with big impact. When we move from enforcing learning to partnering in it, children respond differently. They feel respected. Understood. Seen. And perhaps most importantly, like learning is something they want to do—not have to do.

When Nothing Seems to Work—Start with Connection

If your child is deeply resistant to school or believes they’re “bad at learning,” no method—not even play—works without trust. They need to feel safe before they can be curious. In these moments, shift your focus away from results and toward reconnection. As this guide on academic confidence explains, building back belief in oneself is sometimes the biggest lesson of all.

Start by sitting beside them—not in front of them. Play the game with them, even if it means pretending to be a castle guard practicing multiplication facts. Celebrate their effort more than their speed. And sprinkle your interactions with encouraging words they can carry into the classroom the next day.

Let Learning Be Light Again

If you find yourself bracing for the next homework battle, ask: “How can I turn this into a game, a story, or a shared laugh?”

You're not failing your child by stepping away from what school tells you learning should look like. You're empowering them by helping them rediscover how joyful learning can be. With new tools and a playful mindset, even long-standing struggles can shift.

And you don’t have to do it all alone. Whether it’s a quiz built from a snapshot of last week’s lesson, or bedtime Math turned into an audio mission where your child rescues the kingdom—supportive resources are there to help make learning feel like play again.

Because when a child plays, they’re not avoiding the work. They’re doing it—joyfully, wholeheartedly, and with wonder.