What If Football Could Make a Child Want to Learn
Some children love opening a school book. Others would much rather be kicking a football. But what happens when we bring the two worlds together?
Ask a football-mad youngster about their favourite player and they may know everything.
Goals scored. Shirt number. Nationality. Club. Position. Perhaps even statistics from last weekend’s match.
Ask the same child to sit down with a traditional workbook and suddenly that enthusiasm can disappear.
So maybe the problem isn’t always the subject.
Sometimes it’s the way we introduce it.
That’s the thinking behind Maranovo’s Football Education Books, which connect subjects including English, maths, geography and history with something millions of children already enjoy: football.
Learning Is Everywhere in Football
Once you start looking, education is all over the game.
A league table contains maths.
A match report uses English.
International football opens the door to geography, countries and flags.
The great players, clubs and events of previous generations provide routes into history.
Football gives learning a familiar setting.
Instead of asking a child to forget about their favourite subject while they learn, why not occasionally use that enthusiasm to encourage learning?
That’s an important distinction.
The football isn’t replacing education.
It’s helping provide a way into it.
Maranovo’s educational range is designed around that principle, with football-themed activities covering areas such as reading, writing, vocabulary, maths, measurement and problem-solving.
For a young football fan, that can make an enormous difference to how an activity feels.
A maths question becomes a football problem.
Geography becomes a journey around the footballing world.
Writing becomes telling the story of a match.
And learning suddenly has something familiar attached to it.
Perhaps we shouldn’t always be asking children to put football away before they open a book.
Perhaps sometimes football should be the reason they open it.
