Feel like your child needs some help to maximise their academic performance? You’ve come to the right place!
Unfortunately, the school system isn’t a one-size-fits-all system. That why, some kids may be performing poorer than their classmates, and need some help to learn at their own pace. Here are seven ways to help your kid do better in school:
-
Make your child’s teacher your partner
No person knows your child’s academic performance better than their teachers. As a parent, you only see your child’s results but understand very little about their learning process. Whereas their teachers guide your kids through this process and can determine what are your child’s weaknesses and strengths in school.
In other words, if you want to help your child improve their academic performance, you need to develop a partnership with their teacher. Your child’s teacher will contact you if any problems develop with your child and they will offer some great tips for helping your kid learn at home.
-
Ask for specialised help if you think your child may need it
If you notice that your child may have some problems learning, maybe they need some specialised support to develop academic skills at their own pace.
For example, speech and language disorder is a common communication issue that can affect a child’s academic performance. Luckily, a speech therapist can help by performing speech therapy techniques used to improve communication, such as articulation therapy and language intervention activities.
-
Teach them resilience
Gaining any skill requires time and practise before you can master it. And, it goes the same for your child as well. Before they get good at something, they first have to start out being bad at that thing.
So, you may want to teach your child that failure is a stepping-stone to success rather than a reason to lose their motivation. Your attitude as their parent towards their failures will have a significant influence on your child’s position when they fail or need more practice to get good at something.
Your child’s failure, be it a bad grade or a lost sports competition, is an excellent opportunity to teach them resilience. In other words, you can show your child that getting good a something or gaining success requires hard work, motivation, and patience. This way, they will learn how to get back on their feet quickly when they don’t succeed at something at first.
-
Don’t overpraise
There’s a fine line between showing support to your child at all times and overpraising them. Unfortunately, most parents struggle to find a balance between the two.
Now, we are not saying that you shouldn’t praise your child’s success both in school and extracurricular activities. We are saying that you shouldn’t overpraise them because this can lead to your child setting unrealistic expectation about themselves and creating a self-image that may have disastrous consequences. In other words, later in life, your child may realise that they are not as “brilliant” or “amazing” as they thought they were.
Plus, overpraising your kid may also affect their motivation to work harder towards achieving better results.
-
Help them with homework
Helping your child do their homework is mandatory if you want them to start taking learning seriously. After leaving school and getting home, tons of distractions may keep your kid from getting their homework done. So, it would help if you set aside a special place to help your child study, remove all distractions such as TV, computer, or toys, and establish a regular time for doing homework.
Apart from that, make sure that you sit next to your child when doing their homework to help them in case they don’t know how to solve an assignment. However, remember that doing your child’s homework for them won’t help them in the long run. So, only be there for offering support if needed.
-
Engage your child in active learning activities
Learning doesn’t stop when your child leaves the classroom or finishes their homework. In fact, when they are little, children’s brains are like a sponge that keeps on collecting information and learning. So, now it is the best time to make sure that your kid continues to learn even when they are playing.
In fact, learning is a hundred time harder if your child sees it as a chore. Yet, when you help them develop a positive attitude towards learning, they will become more engaged, creative, and willing to persist at a difficult task.
How do you engage your child in active learning? By involving games in learning as much as possible. If you turn learning into a game for your child, they will become more engaged and learn much more quickly.
Scientific study has called this “gamification”, and the term is used to describe the action of turning something into a game to improve engagement.
-
Look beyond your child’s academic results
One of the biggest mistakes most parents do is labelling their child’s cognitive abilities based on their school results. Why is this a mistake? Because let’s be honest, the school system isn’t perfect for everybody. Some kids can’t relate to everything that happens in the classroom, including teaching methods, learning in a group, or learning a range of subjects at once. As a result, those kids tend to have more mediocre academic outcomes than their classmates. Yet, this is by far a sign that you have a dumber kid.
Before you label your child’s cognitive abilities based on their academic results in school, make sure that the system is right for the development of their skills. In other words, maybe your child will do better with a home tutor or by studying in a school with different teaching methods. So, don’t just look at school results and label your child but rather analyse what could help them do better.
Getting involved in your child’s education is one of the best ways to make sure that they get all support they need to do well in school.
