15 Ideas for Motivating Your Child to Do Well in School

It’s no secret that your child’s academic performance can directly affect her future, but it’s difficult to get kids to think about such long-term goals in relation to a task they don’t find particularly enjoyable. Helping your child to reach her full potential is one of your most important jobs, but it can also be one of the most challenging you face as a parent. These 15 tips can help you find ways of motivating your child to be the very best she can be, even when she’s struggling at school.

1. Get Involved – Open a line of communication with your child’s teacher, work directly with her to make a difference and stay involved with her academic life to affect positive change. It’s almost impossible to make a quantifiable difference in your child’s performance at school when you’re just shouting orders from the sidelines.
2. Support Independence – Helping your child when she truly needs it is important, but so is fostering a sense of independence and faith in her own abilities. Encouraging an independent, can-do attitude will almost always have better results than making her feel as if she can’t succeed without your help at every turn.
3. Maintain a Positive Attitude – Even if you worked for weeks to prepare for a test that your child ultimately received a bad grade on, maintain an upbeat attitude and refuse to dwell on past failures. Instead, emphasize all of the steps you’ll take together to get better results next time.
4. Praise His Efforts – When you know that your child is doing his best, it’s important to praise his efforts regardless of the grades that he gets. Embracing strengths and weaknesses lets your child know that his effort has value and that your love isn’t conditional upon his report card.
5. Provide Corrective Feedback – Underscoring every mistake and using them to browbeat your child will only make him more upset, but providing constructive, positive feedback when he slips up can help him to avoid those mistakes next time.
6. Know Your Child’s Individual Needs – It’s natural to want to believe that your child is an undiscovered genius in all aspects of life, but it simply isn’t likely to be true. Just like their adult counterparts, every child has his own areas of strength and weakness. If he’s a great speller but tends to struggle with math, spend extra time studying the numbers and offer plenty of praise for his grades on a spelling test.
7. Create a Homework Schedule Together – Kids feel more ownership over a schedule they helped to create, and as such are more likely to respect it. Working out a homework routine together and giving your child plenty of input can cut down on struggles when it’s time to crack the books.
8. Offer Incentives – There’s a difference between incentives and bribery, even if the line is a fine one. You may understand the long-term rewards of doing well in school, but a young child only sees something unpleasant and unrewarding. Offering incentives for strong efforts can help your child connect hard work with recognizable results, something that will come naturally as he gets older and understands the impact school and education will have on his adult life.
9. Reward Extra Effort – Some kids struggle in school because they’re genuinely having trouble with grasping the material, while others fall behind out of a disinclination to do the required work. If your child falls into the latter camp, work with her to provide rewards for expending extra effort. For instance, an extra 30 minutes of study time gains 10 more minutes of leisure time before bed.
10. Live in the Moment – You look at your child’s fifth grade report card and see a college admissions letter. She just sees the grades she got this term. While it’s important to keep the big picture in mind, it’s also essential to live in the moment and work on one step at a time.
11. Set Attainable Goals – Expecting your child to go from a failing grade to the honour roll in one term simply isn’t reasonable, and her failure to reach that unrealistic goal you’ve set for her will only increase her frustration. Setting a series of smaller, more attainable goals will help her improve over time under less intense pressure.
12. Communicate the Importance of School work – Berating your child about her future and the damage she’s doing by failing to perform academically probably won’t help much, but calmly explaining the role that her education plays in the rest of her life could be effective. Make sure that you talk about the reasons why good grades are important, rather than simply demanding that she get them.
13. Look for Everyday Learning Opportunities – Work on simple Mathematics skills at the grocery store or sound out words by reading a menu together. Every day you can find a variety of real-world applications for the skills your child is trying to learn, and helping her to find them will not only hone those skills, but will also make it easier for her to understand their uses.
14. Encourage Resilience – Learning to bounce back from a disappointment is an essential coping skill for everyone, regardless of their abilities. It’s especially important for young children that are struggling to keep up with their peers academically, as the experience can be a humiliating and disheartening one.
15. Avoid Self Comparisons – Telling your child that you were great at reading when you were her age and that you don’t understand why she’s struggling doesn’t encourage her to do better, it only makes her feel worse about herself. Avoid the urge to draw comparisons, and remember that your child is an individual completely separate from you.

 (Published with permission from Parttimenanny.org)

5 Ways to Help Kids Who Are Struggling With Homework

Though some progressive schools around the country have taken steps to eliminate homework, it still remains a fixture in the lives of most students. Homework can also be the source of much household suffering, either due to a refusal to complete assignments that ultimately affects academic performance or a difficulty completing the work. Before you throw in the towel altogether, give these five suggestions a try in order to get the students in your family back on track.

1. Nip Excuses in the Bud – Kids will come up with remarkably creative excuses to get out of doing their homework, especially if they’re having trouble with the work or are eager to pursue activities that they enjoy. Refusing to accept excuses and establishing a routine of completing homework on a set schedule can make a noticeable difference in homework struggles that are built around kids’ efforts to evade homework. When your child knows that his efforts to avoid his homework will not be effective, he’s more likely to direct his energy elsewhere.
2. Verify Kids’ Claims – Two of the most popular ways of getting out of homework is to claim that it was completed during free time or that there was none assigned. While actively showing distrust for your kids’ claims can be detrimental to their self-esteem, it’s still a good idea to make sure that you establish a system of verifying their claims in regard to homework. Making it routine to go over assignment planners or to check homework together can help you ascertain just how much homework your child has without actively accusing him of being dishonest.
3. Work on an Incentive Plan – For many kids, homework just doesn’t seem to serve much of a point. There’s no tangible payoff for the time invested in filling out those worksheets or writing assigned papers, so it can understandably seem like a waste of time to them. There’s a fine line between creating an incentive plan and bribing your child to do the things he’s supposed to do, but it is possible. When your child is able to connect his hard work and all the effort he’s putting into his homework with actual, tangible results, he may change his tune. Making sure that your child understands how his grades are connected to the effort he puts in and that there are rewards for doing his very best in school is important.
4. Establish a Line of Communication with Teachers – Whether you’re looking for verification of assignments or looking for the best way to help a child that’s having trouble with his schoolwork, it’s important to make sure that you’ve established and are actively maintaining an open line of communication with your child’s teacher. Kids that want to do their best in school, but find it difficult to grasp the work, can easily become frustrated and lose their interest in academia altogether. Working with his teacher to find the best way of helping him overcome his difficulties is essential, especially if your child’s frustration is reaching a level that’s difficult to manage.
5. Get to the Root of the Problem – The most effective way of helping your child overcome a homework struggle is to find the root of the problem and address it directly. If he’s having trouble focusing or grasping the material and is avoiding it because he feels that it’s above his skill level, work with him until he’s feeling more confident. It’s also important to swallow your pride and ask for help yourself if you need to. Not only have teaching methods changed since your own school days, but skills that you haven’t used in decades can become rusty. When you’re able to work with your child one on one to determine his individual learning style and needs, you’ll be able to tailor your approach to homework help accordingly.

In some cases, it may be necessary to consider working with a tutoring program to give your child the extra attention that he needs to succeed to the best of his abilities. Helping your child reach his full potential is your job as a parent, even if doing so requires you to take measures you wouldn’t expect. You may also want to discuss persistent problems with a specialist, especially if you suspect a learning disability that requires special care. In such cases, many young students’ academic performance improves significantly after the appropriate measures are taken to help him work around the roadblocks he’s encountered.

With permission from: admin | in Nanny Websites Posted on February 21, 2013