Category: School

5 Fun Ways to Help Enhance Your Child’s Learning Potential

As parents, you are your child’s first teacher. While you may already be actively involved in their education, there are still things you should be doing at home to help them evolve academically. You’ll need to be the motivator and support system that helps your child to not only retain the information they’re learning now but creates new experiences that will help them succeed in the future – both personally and academically. Learning Can be Fun Teaching your child new experiences does not have to be about sitting them down and going over math problems or having them write in their journal. It can actually be “disguised” in fun and creative ways that make them forget that they’re learning in the first place. Below are some great ideas or activities you might try to help boost your child’s “brainpower”:

Delaying School Start for Summer-Born and Premature Children

Delaying Start of School for Summer-Born or Premature Children Lowers Academic Performance, Says Study; Some Parents Disagree Children who start school a year later due to summer birthdays or premature births may do worse academically later on, according to a British study published recently in the Journal of Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology.

Helping Your Child Prepare for Tests

12 Tips to Help Your Child Do Well on Tests Other than making sure your child gets plenty of study time to prepare for a test, are there specific things that you and he or she can do, to insure they do their best on a test?

Seven Ways to Encourage and Improve Your Child’s Academic Success

So, you think you may have the next Einstein or medicine Nobel prize recipient in your home … or perhaps you simply want to ensure that you give your child the best chance to succeed in life by helping them get a great education. Whatever your motivation, many parents are interested in finding ways to help their children succeed academically. Educators say that there are specific things that parents can do to enhance their child’s chances of success. Here are six ways to help you help your child do well in school:

What Are Good Foods to Eat for a Child Who Plays Sports?

When it comes to food, the great thing about it is that we all have very similar nutritional needs: for the most part, what’s good for one person is good for everyone, and what’s bad for one person is bad for all. Some people, including a lot of the experts, would have us believe that we need to go on special diets to suit our individual needs; but while that approach might make a lot of people in the diet and nutrition business wealthy, the truth is that our personal physiologies are much more similar to everyone else’s than they are different.

Important Steps to Prevent Sports-Related Injuries

The following is a break-down of what parents need to know, to help their children remain free from sports-related injuries. Education Doctors treat around one million sports-related injuries in American school-age children every year. For parents, it is important to learn basic ways to avoid injury when their children practice sports, whether it’s at school or around the neighborhood.

The Advantages of Homeschooling

Once upon a time in the United States, all children were taught either at home, or through apprenticeships, where they learned a trade with which they would later earn a livelihood. But in the mid 1800’s, public schools began proliferating throughout the country, and most children subsequently started attending public schools. In recent decades, however, more and more American parents have begun looking to homeschooling again as an option for educating their children. In 2012, three percent of all school-age children — about 1.5 million — were being homeschooled in the U.S. The top three professions for the fathers in these households were: accountant/engineer (17.3%), professor/doctor/lawyer (16.9%), and small-business owner (10.7%).

Keep Your Kids Learning Through the Summer

No student remembers every single thing she learns in school. Even over the course of a school day, many things will go in a child’s ear and out the other. And as any parent who is active in the educational process knows, kids are wildly inconsistent with their learning. They learn some things with little effort, while other things require endless repetition and instruction. In any case, it is only natural for some of the things a child learns during the school year to be lost during those three to four summer months. Much that is lost will be

Is My Child A Bully?

In the UK alone approximately sixteen children a year commit suicide because of the trauma they endure due to bullying. The offending children who have tirelessly bullied their victims know exactly what they are doing but it seems that sometimes, the people in authority such as school teachers claim they did not know the bullying was taking place. Friends of the bullies also probably knew what was happening. Before a child has to have medical treatment or dies, people need to speak up if they suspect such bullying.

Developing Your Child’s Handwriting Skills

By Lisa Pecos With the rise of computers and electronic gadgets as tools for all types of school-related activities, kids spend far less time writing by hand than they used to. As a result, many people fear that the ancient art of handwriting is bound to become a thing of the past. While this is true to some extent-writing by hand is certainly less important than it used to be-it is still important to have good handwriting for the times when it is called for.

Kids and Homework: What Can Parents Do?

By Jamell Williams When sending our kids to school, we expect the majority of their education to take place during the six or so hours per day when they are actually in the classroom. But for parents, it is important to realize that education needs to be reinforced in the home. This means not only helping kids with their studies, but also imposing homework times and engaging them in conversation about the things they are learning at school. It is easy to fall into a pattern of over reliance on our children’s teachers—but we must remember that teachers have dozens of kids to worry about. Our kids need us to make their education deeper and more personalized.

It’s OK to be Different

Our son Michael was potty trained at nine months and spoke in sentences at 12 months old. At age two, he would listen to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite over and over. When a friend gave my husband and I tickets to see the Nutcracker one holiday season, I cringed! Mike did stand up comedy at the age of three, and we thought it was necessary to put him into Pre-School to learn to read and write his own first name.

How to Encourage Kids to Love Reading

With the rise of television, video games, and now the internet and digital devices, many are worried that the old habit of sitting down and reading a good book is on its way out with the coming generation. But while the act of reading is certainly undergoing change, reading is still a fundamental component of education, and it is as fun as it ever was. For 21st-century parents, fostering the reading habit comes with some unique challenges, but there are a few things you can do to ensure that your kids grow up loving to read books.

First Day of School

To overcome the fear of the first day at nursery, playgroup or school is a big step for your child. Talking to your child about it can help them prepare and alleviate some of their fears. They will naturally be anxious of the unknown so explain and describe where they will be going and for how long they will be there. Also create some excitement about the activities they will be involved with. Ask them what they are expecting school to be like and discuss any fears they are holding on to. Reassure that they will be collected by you or another carer at the end of the day. Do not dismiss any fears that seem silly to you. Listen and talk about whatever they might be worrying about.

7 Ways to Improve Your Child’s School Performance

By Lisa Pecos School is where kids acquire the bulk of their learning, but it is hard to have success at school without a solid foundation of education in the home, starting at a very early age and continuing through the teen years. Most parents are aware of the things they can do to prepare their young children for the school years, but too many parents neglect to continue their early efforts, assuming that the teachers will take care of the rest. If you want your child to have the best chances of success later in life, it is important to continue your educational efforts. Here are just a few ways that you can help.

Our Nations Most Powerful Educators; The Parents

By Tiffany Chappelle ‘Oh, I wish I had the time!’ are the words most often uttered from other parents when I mention I read to my two sons, ages six and eight every single night for a minimum of thirty minutes. I am torn between insult by this comment, which suggests that I am not as busy as they are, and pity they and their children are being denied such an amazing experience. I see this time as essential not only for reconnecting with my boys after a day apart, as a chance to snuggle and be affectionate, or to create a magical, bonding moment that will be treasured for a lifetime, but also as a chance to practice our listening, comprehension, and vocabulary skills. No, I don’t have a degree in education, and I am not striving for one. But the day a person becomes a parent they are given the honor and responsibility of being the primary and most influential educators in their child’s life. A mother or father is the first educators a child encounters, the ones that know their children best, and the ones who should have the highest interest in their children’s success in school. It’s a tragedy that we as parents in this country are not living up to this important role in our children’s lives.

Children and Illness: The Main Reasons that Kids Miss School

By Cyndra Neal Many parents can probably relate to having a child who seems to be sick all the time. Often times, parents find themselves wondering why their kids get sick so often. They may even feel like their kids are sick more often than other people’s children. The reality, however, is that most kids get sick several times a year, particularly when they are younger.

Being Bilingual — Is it Right for Your Child?

When I was going through elementary school, my mom would always have me in a bilingual classroom. She’s bilingual (English and Spanish), and when I was a preschooler, so was I. (We lived in Chile then, and when we moved back to California, she wanted me to be able to maintain my Spanish). At the time, there were classes where the majority of students were English learners (ESL) with a handful of students, (such as me) that were Spanish learners (SSL). These days, more and more parents want to have their child learn a second language and as a result, we’re seeing the popularity of bilingual programs rise. Learning to speak a second language is a wonderful experience, but how can you tell if it’s right for your child? Breezy Mama turns to Corie De Anda, M.S., Bilingual Program Specialist for Carlsbad Unified, for the answers. –Alex Part 1: Learning a second language before kindergarten (For Part 2: Learning a second language in elementary school — click here) What is the best age for beginning to teach my child a second language?

Math Anxiety: Are You Passing Yours On To Your Child?

by Donna Verry Dee Karen Greenburg of Mesa Arizona hated math as a child and she sees history repeating itself with her daughter, Angela. “She’s very frustrated with math,” says Greenburg of the second-grader. “She mostly dislikes doing drills and timed tests. I think I may have passed that on to her through my poor attitude about it. I have been known to say, ‘I don’t understand why they have to memorize math facts and take timed tests.’ I think she has picked up on that and uses it to her advantage.”

Help Your Child Get Organized For School!

By Susan Kruger Disorganization is the greatest complaint made by teachers and ranks as a very close second complaint from parents (rivaling fights and arguments over homework). Every teacher can tell stories about bright and intelligent students who are failing classes because they lack the organizational skills to keep track of their assignments. School counselors and psychologists talk about the huge caseloads of students that are referred to them for suspected learning disabilities, only to discover that a large percentage of these students simply lack organizational skills. It is a growing epidemic.