Wednesday, April 30, 2008

IELTS Essay: Children' leisure activities

Some people believe that children’s leisure activities must be educational, otherwise they are a complete waste of time.
Do you agree or disagree?
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your experience.

Nowadays children spend so much time at school and attend various additional classes and this makes some educational specialists feel pity for them. They suggest giving kids more spare time to play and have fun. Meanwhile, there is an opinion that youngsters should do only those activities that benefit their knowledge and educate them, and I totally agree with this point of view.

Of course, the volume of the information children receive at school and ought to memorize is enormous and they should be given some free time to relax. Playing with others is essential to develop communication skills and this also gives young brains some rest.

Although, we have to admit that in our competitive world the more time a kid devotes to the study process the better life he can achieve. There are ways to make playing with others very educational and parents should encourage their children to play games which make brain work. For example, kids could have a competition combining physical activity and some kind of trivia on geography, like we had in our childhood. Moreover, even computer games can be very intelligent. There are so many electronic entertainments which teach languages, gives information on history, geography, that child addicted to computers could become very smart and educated.

In addition, unattended kid hardly makes proper use of his leisure time. If it happens, children just watch TV or get under peer pressure. They unfortunately do not have skills of analyzing and filtering what is bad or what is good. Education through games instead makes them occupied and in the same time teaches analyzing.

To conclude with, education through fun is not very exhausting for kids but its usefulness can be great. It would be a shame to devote this time to the TV or other entertainment.

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