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Kids learn many important subjects at school, from math, literature, science, and more. Even the best schools don’t have the bandwidth to teach everything children should know.

If you’re trying to enrich your child’s education and ensure they have a fun time, keep the following ideas in mind.

Learn to Code Online

The leading online coding courses for kids revolve around teaching children to design and program their own video games so they have a ton of fun while learning skills that the workforce values highly. If you’ve ever tried to pry your child away from playing video games and wished they were that attached to learning, try an online coding class!

Look for one that teaches the most relevant coding languages, like Python, Java, JavaScript, C#, or C++. When your child can write in the coding languages driving popular apps like Netflix or games like Minecraft, you know they’re learning useful skills. The classes will teach them to think analytically, creatively, and meticulously, like an engineer.

Finally, leading coding schools also tend to hire teachers from undergrad computer science and computer engineering program since they have genuine expertise and also grew up playing video games in their youth. Ideally, the course you select has small classes of four or fewer students, so your child doesn’t have to compete with rivals for their teacher’s attention.

Music Lessons

The gift of music is something infinitely valuable specifically because its value is beyond words. Just try to describe or quantify a melody or a tune! Music is experiential. It’s something people feel in their souls.

Teaching kids how to play and understand music helps them grow in different ways. Music is a language, and learning it can help children’s mental development. It’ll sharpen their memory and exercise the parts of the brain that impact creativity.

Knowing how to play an instrument will also deepen their appreciation for listening to music. They’ll never listen to it the same way after running their fingers over an instrument.

Chess

Knowing how to play chess is a wonderful life skill! Many consider chess to be the brain at play, logic distilled purely into game form. Unlike other games like poker or backgammon, there’s no element of chance or luck in chess because there are no cards or dice — the players control everything.

Chess is wonderful because, even at grandmaster levels, players with opposite temperaments compete on an equal playing field. Offensive players who attack with flair can bump against defensive players who like slowly ratcheting up a position because there’s no right or wrong way to play.

Old and young, creative versus mathematical, it doesn’t matter. After you learn some rules and basic strategies, you can spend multiple lifetimes mastering it and still not have enough time. It’s that fun and inexhaustible.

A child can be set for life if they absorb all the information they learn at school. They’ll know enough to enter the workforce one day and have a teeming inner life. But it’s impossible to have too much knowledge, and learning these extracurriculars will give them a competitive edge when job hunting and a richer and more pleasurable life.