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PrimaryEnglish

How to Use Humour to Help Children Retain Information

A good giggle can help children retain important information – and Greg James and Chris Smith know just how to get one started…

Greg James Chris Smith
by Greg James Chris Smith
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PrimaryEnglish

Lots of fairly weird and, hopefully, funny things happen in the classroom in our first children’s book, Kid Normal. A TV explodes; two tiny horses are released to gallop around; and at one point the whole room gets sprayed with soup.

And whilst sadly, none of these specific things actually happened during our own education, it’s always the odd and slightly mad events from your school life that you tend to remember, even years later – the moments when the whole class laughs as one.

It could be the age-old act of mistakenly calling your teacher ‘mum’ or ‘dad’ that causes hoots of laughter, or it might be a rarer, more incredible gem – like when Greg’s French teacher became so enraged with his immaturity that he got muddled up and shouted, “Errr, Greg ‘ow old are you, err, five o’clock?!”.

Everyone broke down into tears of laughter – including the teacher. It actually brought the class much closer together, seeing his human side. (In Monsieur’s defence, Greg was seventeen at the time…)

So – how important is it to laugh in class? Well, there are quite a few studies that suggest it could be very important indeed. Research has shown that laughter can help recall, for example; quite simply, we tend to remember things that happened when we were feeling really happy.

One study revealed that people who watched comedy programmes about the news – like the Daily Show – actually knew more about current affairs afterwards than people who watched the, erm, actual news.

And back in 2006, researchers in the US gave two different groups of students the same lecture, but with or without jokes.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that the students who laughed during class remembered far more of the information afterwards; because they’d been the most engaged when it was being delivered.

Connection and trust

Besides, laughing together breaks down so many barriers. When we’ve been doing live events about Kid Normal, the moments when people seem to be the most engaged and relaxed are when we’re all laughing together.

We learnt very quickly to put the silliest, most comedic bit of our show in the first five minutes. It involves one of us donning a top hat and a cape and prancing about asking the children questions.

The audiences seem to love it, and everyone is on side immediately. It puts everyone on the same footing – and you’re more likely to listen to, and learn from, someone you feel is on your level.

Someone who makes you laugh is immediately someone you trust; and of course, that’s an important bond to create between teachers and students as well.

We all remember a funny teacher. And we remember the things they taught us (although of course there’s a difference between being laughed with and laughed at, as every education professional knows).

But how do you make children laugh? Well, in very much the same way that you make anyone else laugh – with a bit of surprise, and a lot of fun.

Writing Kid Normal, we never really felt that we had to adapt our humour to any particular audience. Maybe that’s because we both have an emotional age of about nine.

However, children are very sensitive to being talked down to, and we’d never want to do that.

So, there are some jokes in the book that not everyone will get – but there are no jokes that deliberately target just one type of person in particular. We simply felt that if something made us laugh, chances are it might make someone else laugh as well.

Funny business

We guess there’ll be a lot of teachers reading this who’ll now be remembering a moment when they made the kids they were teaching really, really crack up laughing. It’s a great feeling, isn’t it?

So, next time you’re having trouble making the latest part of the National Curriculum engaging and fascinating, try introducing some proper, guffaw-inducing humour! Not sure how? Here are some tips that might help…

First, never patronise your pupils. Don’t worry that they might not get every part of the joke or reference.

We did a great deal of thinking back to the things that made us laugh when we were kids when we started coming up with Kid Normal and the conclusion was that we actually quite liked jokes and references that weren’t aimed at us.

Kids tend to be aspirational, and even when something makes them laugh, it might not be until years later that they truly understand the reference. And that’s fine.

It happened to me recently when I revisited the great radio comedy Round The Horne. Aged 11, I didn’t necessarily know why it was funny, it just was.

Secondly, don’t be scared to introduce kids to new jokes or ideas. The age group that we write for has the most open and brilliantly untapped minds and they seem to love exploring and expanding them.

In short, don’t just give them a load of stuff they already find funny; be brave and trust them to go along with you. They are at an age where they love to learn and they are used to doing so – so they’ll actually find it quite exciting.

Finally, be kind, inclusive and silly, with kindness being the most important element. Nasty humour isn’t needed here, it serves no purpose.

Everyone should feel relaxed and happy and part of the story or joke. Warmth is an incredibly underrated trait and one that should be given a lot of thought and consideration when writing – or ‘performing’ – for a young audience.

Even our bumbling useless villain never feels bullied or belittled by our main characters. His own words and actions implicitly make him a figure of fun, so don’t be afraid of being subtle sometimes. Children will understand!

And if all else fails, talk about some baby otters having a wee, as we do in one chapter. Just don’t end up spraying soup all over your classroom; the caretaker will kill you.

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