With proper support and planning, there are ways to mitigate getting swamped by the new school year — and to help your child succeed academically.
Check out these study skills tips from the Sylvan Learning Center to help your child have a successful year.
Study skills by grade:
Kinder through 2nd: For these years, it’s all about creating routines and learning how to learn. During these years, you want to prioritize school attendance (don’t miss too much school), practice completing tasks, creating daily routines where you read books, practice writing and solving problems. This is where parents make the biggest impact on a child’s executive function and development. If a child is having difficulty with reading and phonics, get help now.
3rd-6th grade: Building upon routine, here is where you want to focus on time management and organization. For example, writing down assignments, keeping a calendar and understanding when things are due. Ideally, any reading and math skill gaps should be closed in these grades; otherwise, study skills will be severely impacted and negative behaviors will become habit.
Learning how to take good notes will give your child a leg up in these grades, but these grades are still about routine, getting things done and strong time management.
Follow the “10-minute by grade rule for homework” if your child is struggling to complete 4th grade homework in 40 minutes, 5th grade homework in 50 minutes, etc., talk to your teacher and explore getting a tutor. When students labor too much with how to do the work, they can become anxious and discouraged, /then, they stop doing the work and grades suffer.
7th grade onward: Building on time management and organization, students need to learn good note-taking, test-taking skills and writing skills. Writing is both an academic requirement and a study skill because it is through writing that students demonstrate how to process and analyze information from text. If your child has poor writing skills, they likely have poor study skills.
Understand teachers’ expectations
Students have the most difficulty at the beginning of the school year understanding teacher expectations and creating effective routines. In the lower grades, the best teachers reinforce expectations over and over and develop routines for their students so they can succeed, but at the higher grades (middle school and high school), teachers hand out a syllabus and/or spend their first class reviewing expectations and then jump into instruction.
Many students don’t understand how important that information is and don’t take that information too seriously. That is a mistake. Knowing what your teacher expects, knowing how you are going to be graded, etc., is critical to success. This is a foundational study skill. If your child is shy or struggles to ask questions in a large group of students, then you’ll need to get involved and teach your child how to speak with teachers . . . or, get a tutor.
Top organizational tips
- Know exactly what is expected of you at the beginning of the school year, and if you are not confident that you’ll do well, get a tutor. Don’t wait for bad grades, as these are lagging indicators (backwards looking). The essence of study skills is “planning to succeed.” If you know you struggled in Algebra last year (e.g. you received a C+ or B or worse), and now you’re in Geometry or Algebra 2, why wait to get a tutor? The mindset should be, “If I’m getting A’s, then I can spend less time with my tutor on that subject.”
- For the younger grades, my best advice is to get an academic assessment at the beginning of the school year. This way you know how prepared your child is for the upcoming school year. You want no surprises as a parent. Children need to experience success academically on a continual basis. It builds their confidence. Likewise, if they struggle for too long it damages their confidence quickly and many kids will just shut down. Be as proactive as possible. This is your child’s education!
Todd Crabtree is owner of the Sylvan Learning Center Pasadena.
