How can making learning fun impact the rate at which children learn at school?

This is often a topic of discussion in educational circles.  The key is to look at what we may really mean by "fun".  There is more to it, I think, than making learning into some sort of game.  The key to making learning fun, really, is to be able to elicit and then tune into a student's motivational pattern. 

Tools such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming are often very useful in the school setting, because it has tools that enable you to do just that. You can find what gets a student "tuned in" with things the already like to do, and then just map those modalities and submodalities over to the school subjects. 

I have used this many times, and almost always with great results.  The best part of it is, it empowers the student to "make learning fun" by him/herself, and not have to rely on getting that externally from the teacher.  This truly teaches them how to have a rewarding journey in life long learning.

In addition, once a teacher taps into this motivational pattern, the next step would be to elicit how the student is trying to learn a particular subject.  When a student is having difficulty, this will often lead to de-motivation. 

It would be useful to find which modality (learning style) a student is trying to use, whether visual, auditory, or kinesthetic.  The work by the late Dr. Don Blackerby states that in almost all fundamental school skills, the visual pattern is the optimal one.  Therefore, if you elicit that the student is using one of the other modalities, it would be beneficial to teach them how to use the visual mode for learning. 

This again would help make learning easier, and because of that, it would be make learning fun to the student as well.  Imagine students being able to learn without school becoming emotionally painful or traumatic!