Got children? As soon as they hit school age, chances are, you’re worrying about how they’re getting on and wondering how you can help them to really achieve their full potential. Education is such a major element of any child’s life, consuming most of their hours on weekdays, and can help them in the future too – opening the doors to whatever path they want to take in regards to their work and career. Of course, there are steps you can take to assist them on this journey. Here are a few that you might like to take into consideration.
Homework
The vast majority of children receive homework that allows them to practice and go over skills that they learnt in their lessons during the day. Most homework will be relatively challenging and will have some sort of deadline attached. It’s important that, firstly, you know your children’s homework schedule, so that you can help to organize them and ensure that everything is done on time. Discuss this with their school or teacher, who may be able to provide you with a timetable, deadline reminders or other useful pushes to let you know when you need to encourage your little one to get their work done. The second way you can help your child in this area is to actively help them with their homework. This doesn’t mean giving them all the answers to get it over and done with. Instead, you’re going to need to simply explain areas that they get stuck with and provide advice and guidance.
Extracurricular Learning
Learning doesn’t have to be confined to the school day hours. Instead, your child may enjoy some extracurricular learning that takes place at home. Think of some different, age appropriate activities that you can set up for your little one to test their knowledge and endow new knowledge on them. You might want to do spelling tests, times tables or even whole-lesson activities with them. This can challenge them and help them to truly master what they are being taught back at school. If you want advice and guidance regarding what might help them, you can always consult their teachers, who will be able to let you know what’s being taught and what’s coming up on their curriculum.
Additional Tutoring
If your child is notably struggling with a specific area of their work – their teacher may consult you on this – you will likely be looking for a solution that will help. This can come in the form of official, additional tutoring. If your child’s teacher thinks this is required, chances are, they’ll let you know. We all have different strengths and weaknesses and the same will ring true for your child. But tutoring can help to strengthen these weaker areas and will give your child a better, more well rounded knowledge than if you simply leave them be.
Experiential Learning
All children have different learning methods. Some are academic and will thrive in the type of environment where they sit down with a book, a teacher and a pen and paper. But others may learn better through experience. This is where experiential learning can come into play. This type of teaching introduces your child to a subject in real life, then leaves them to understand it, analyze it and determine its importance. Experiential learning can take the form of trips too. There are so many places that you can take your children to expand their knowledge. Museums, art galleries, space centers, science centers, nature walks, wildlife sanctuaries – the list goes on and on. You never know what subject might spark your little one’s interest, so explore until you find something they can set their heart on.
Relaxation
Your child shouldn’t be working all of the time. They are still young, at the end of the day, and they’re going to want to enjoy something that is of their own choice, rather than something that they are committed to doing for the sake of grades or academic performance. Relaxation is important to prevent them from feeling overwhelmed, overworked or even burning out. There are so many ways that your child can relax. You can watch a film or TV series together, you can run them a bath with bubbles and their favorite toys, they might like you to read them a story. Whatever you choose, make sure that it helps them to wind down and switch off from commitments and responsibilities to do with school for a while.
No Pushy Parenting
It can be easy to become a pushy parent. At the end of the day, you want what’s best for your child and only you can help with that directly. But by pushing them to perform constantly, achieving good grades or working on hobbies that they’re not particularly interested themselves, you can create a whole host of problems for them to experience later in life. These can vary from emotional issues to mental issues or behavioral issues. Instead, you need to make sure that you are supportive of your child and their decisions on an ongoing basis. This means ensuring that they are only engaging in hobbies and activities that they genuinely enjoy and want to be doing. It means not letting them beat themselves up when they experience a lower grade than they wanted, or didn’t pass a test as they might have expected. A strong support network really can help your children to make it through school in good shape.
Social Support
Not all children are automatically going to be super social. Some may need help and encouragement to come out of their shells and engage with others in their age group. You can help this by arranging play dates with other parents, by arranging social activities for your children, allowing supervised sleepovers and more.
Each step can really help your child to make it through their schooling experience. This can be a hard time in anyone’s life, so you need to make sure that you’re being supportive and helpful in the right ways at the right times.
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