In my own experience of learning and growing up, practising repeatedly was the only way to mastery. Repeat something enough times, and eventually you master it. So in the beginning, this was also how I understood the idea that “children learn through repetition”: Practise more, and mastery will follow. Only later did I realise how far my understanding still had to go.

Repetition does not necessarily mean mechanically repeating the same action again and again. When the same person or the same experience appears repeatedly, we slowly move from unfamiliarity to familiarity — that too is a form of repetition. Sometimes, when we revisit the same thing after some time has passed, we notice something new. That is also repetition. And sometimes, simply by looking at the same thing from a different angle, we make an entirely new discovery. That, too, is repetition.

For a period of time, my child wanted me to read The Ugly Duckling every single day. Within less than a month, he could practically recite the whole story from memory. And still, he wanted to hear it again every day. At first, I did not understand why. But later, I began to notice something. Whenever we reached certain lines in the story — lines with a particular rhythm or rhyme — he would naturally join in and read along with me. And each time, his reading became smoother and more confident. Then, after we had stopped reading the story for a while, we returned to it one day together. And suddenly he pointed something out: “The ugly duckling in this book looks different from the ugly duckling in the other book. The colour is different. The shape of the feathers is different too.”

That was repetition. Not stagnation — but deepening understanding.

Do children really find repetition boring? When children are learning to walk, we watch them walk back and forth endlessly — falling down, getting back up, and trying again. Some children repeatedly touch the same object — squeezing it, tapping it, even pressing it against their cheek to feel it more closely. And all of us have experienced children asking the same question over and over again. This is the kind of repetition that truly drives learning. It comes from within the child. And through it, they gain a sense of security in the world around them. It is an instinctive way of learning. When children repeat the same thing, they are not standing still. They are relying on enormous amounts of repeated input in order to master a new skill — until eventually, output becomes possible. From the moment they are born, children spend more than a year listening to the people around them speaking every day before they begin speaking themselves. And the first words and phrases they learn are almost always the ones they have heard most often — the ones repeated again and again.

At first, I often found children’s endless repetition tiring. But later, I realised something important: When children repeatedly do the same thing, they are not necessarily learning the same thing. I came to understand this when my child used to drop toys onto the floor from his high chair, again and again. At first, perhaps he was simply discovering that different objects make different sounds when they hit the ground. Later, perhaps he wanted to know what would happen if he dropped them with different amounts of force. And later still, he definitely discovered something else entirely: while Grandma would patiently pick the toy up every single time, his mother would lose patience after the second or third attempt … he was testing my limits!

When I brought this understanding into the classroom, I often found myself amazed by children’s desire to learn — and by the creative ways in which they explored the world. Gradually, I developed the patience to allow repetition to happen naturally. I stopped interrupting. Stopped rushing to correct. I simply watched, and waited. And then I realised something: The purpose of repetition is not to rush forward. It is to allow understanding to settle, layer by layer. Whenever I managed to let go of my own impatience, the child’s repetition suddenly became much clearer to me. Only then could I see those layers of understanding gradually unfolding.

And so, I learned to step aside.