All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!
Time and again, this quote has proven to be true. While textbook knowledge can give you intellect and knowledge, it is the extracurricular activities that allow students to learn real-life skills and understand the outside world. Whenever you go for admission to schools, you should always focus on the extracurricular activities as well that the schools are offering. This ensures holistic development of your child and prepares him for the real world. Let’s understand this in more detail.
Importance of Extracurricular Activities
Here’s why extracurricular activities are important for the overall development and well-being of your child:
- Holistic Development
Extracurricular activities focus on the holistic development of your child. Activities like dance, yoga and sports lead to physical development while activities like coding, chess or math clubs assist in cognitive development and enhance problem-solving skills. Further, team activities like group projects or theatre help children develop emotionally and socially while imbibing life skills like leadership, teamwork etc.
- Improved Academic Performance
Extracurricular activities indirectly improve the academic performance of children. It reduces stress levels to a great extent and brings a much-needed change in the environment. Physical activities further assist in boosting memory power and enhancing focus and discipline. All these factors greatly contribute towards improved academic performance.
- Boost Self Confidence and Leadership
Leadership and confidence are something that develops when you face the world and challenges. While textbooks can help you understand these terminologies, these skills are developed over time. Extracurricular activities act as a catalyst by giving your child the required opportunities to work on these skills. This can include organising school events, winning quiz rounds or leading a social activity. Further, it instils responsibility and accountability in the children and gives them the required self confidence to win in life.
- Uncover Passion
Some people find passion while others develop it over time. In any case, it is important to try out new things to find out what fascinates you from the inside. It can be anything like singing, dancing, social activities, art etc. Extracurricular activities give students an opportunity to try out various things and understand what excites them to the core. Chances are, your child might build a career out of that passion and outside the academic world.
- Encourages Growth Mindset
Resilience, perseverance and hard work are the much needed skills to survive in this world. Failed experiments, sports losses and rejected ideas help children learn these core truths of life and build resilience and perseverance. This allows them to build a growth mindset and helps them become the life long learner. Further, it increases their adaptability and helps them navigate the challenges more effectively.
Prominent Extracurricular Activities
Following are some of the prominent extracurricular activities one should look into when considering admission to any school:
- Drama and theatre club
- Music
- Dancing
- Art and craft
- Sports day
- Annual functions
- Robotics and coding
- Debates and elocution contests
- Group projects
- Quiz contests, Spell-a-Bee etc.
- Yoga, meditation and skating
- Martial arts and gymnastics
How to Select the Right School?
While quality of education and budget are the primary driving forces when selecting the right school for your child, it is important to give due importance to extracurricular activities for holistic development. However, knowing which school supports such activities can be a challenging task for most parents.
Schoogle is a school discovery platform that allows you to search, filter and compare different schools across various parameters like school fees, amenities, board, medium etc. To know which school offers which extracurricular activities, you can simply search the required amenities and visit the school profile. You can even compare different schools to find out which school offers the best education and development opportunities within your budget. Schoogle your desired school now!