5 Ways to Help Your Child Improve Their Study Habits
Are your child’s grades slipping? Parents and children alike are constantly reminded how important subjects like science and STEM are for our kids’ future. But some kids struggle with the concepts, have poor study habits, or both. What can you do to help your child improve their study habits?
My name is Michael Kirschner. For the last ten years, I’ve delivered impactful school assemblies on science and bully prevention to schools in NJ, NY, CT, and other areas. Parents, teachers, and school administrators praise my ability to balance entertainment with education. Each month I write articles for my blog intended to help busy school administrators and parents.
If your child’s study habits need improving, the following tips may help.
Improve Your Child’s Study Habits Tip #1: Dedicated Study Environment
Distractions can quickly derail the most diligent studying. Where does your child do their homework? If they share their bedroom with a sibling, there may be too many distractions. If one child is talking on the phone to a friend while another is trying to study, it’s an uphill battle to concentrate.
Set up a dedicated study area for your child. If they have their own room, this will likely be much easier. Give them a good place to sit with all of their supplies nearby. Searching for needed supplies is a big-time waster and an easy way for the child to get distracted. Paper, pencils, crayons, reference materials, and more should be within reach.
Improve Your Child’s Study Habits Tip #2: Good Night’s Sleep
Every person, regardless of age, needs a good night’s sleep. But it’s especially true for a growing child. Trying to concentrate on schoolwork when tired is hard. When we are tired, our cognitive functions rapidly decline. We miss things and make easy mistakes.
Look at your child’s daily life. Are they getting enough sleep? Many kids have a thriving life of extracurricular activities outside of school. They may be on a sports team, belong to different clubs, and of course, spend time with friends. If all these activities are too much, your child may need to scale back. Like adults, it’s easy enough for kids to run themselves ragged with too many responsibilities.
Improve Your Child’s Study Habits Tip #3: Organization
One problem many kids have is organization. They don’t know how to prioritize long-term assignments versus short term. To help your child get organized, you may need to offer a helping hand. Sit down with your child and look at their assignments and projects. Ask them to explain what projects are due first, which are due later, and what each entails.
Once you have an idea of due dates and complexity, you can start filing in the calendar. Short-term assignments get added to the calendar first. Try to estimate how long a bugger project will take. In all likelihood, the teacher gave some time estimates. With that info, break the bigger projects into bite-sized pieces. Schedule time for these pieces leading up to the final due date.
This way, you are helping your child learn how to manage their time. And you’re preventing them from bunching the larger projects to the end, too close to their due date to get them down without rushing.
Improve Your Child’s Study Habits Tip #4: Effective Study Techniques
So you’ve helped your child to get organized. They’ve planned out their calendar. They have a dedicated study space. Now it’s time to dive into the actual nuts and bolts of studying. But studying is more than just staring at the pages of a book. It’s time to get active!
Active learning is just like it sounds. Instead of passively reading a book and calling it studying, kids need to get involved. Encourage your child to take notes, summarizing what they’ve read. Suggest writing flashcards to make memorization easier. These and similar tasks get the child involved with studying.
Writing notes summarizing their studies and creating flashcards engages different parts of their brain. Using their hands to write the notes gets them more involved, making the information ‘stick’ more in their memories.
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