Friday, February 18, 2011

Your day with a school child

When your child starts school, the organization of the day for all family members must be changed to comply with his obligations. When he or she goes to school in the morning, the child must have breakfast. Meals should be varied, and dairy products are mandatory. If you are at home, prepare breakfast together, talk about everything but school. If you go to work early, prepare breakfast before, but in the afternoon, make sure that the child had eaten breakfast.                                                               
It is desirable to prepare fruit and candies for snacks. Fast food that kids buy in nearby stores, is unhealthy and creates bad habits. Choose fruits and candies which child likes to eat. If the school organized a snack, even better, prepare only fruits.

When a child comes from school, talk to him. First find out if the child is tired, whether the day at school was interesting, about his/hers friends, and then ask for marks. Usually child will tell it spontaneously. If the child has good grades, show pleasure, praise, suggest that this is the result of hard work. If the grade is lower or below expectations, do not scold the child. He is unhappy enough for that. Try to find out what caused bad grades, sometimes it is not the lack of knowledge. Encourage and console him/her, create a plan to help your child to improve his marks. Tell him, for example: No big deal, you can fix it. Lets make a plan, Mom and Dad will help you”
It would be the best if the child, after a short break, immediately learns all the lessons and do the homework from the present school day. Follow the course of learning, find out how much he/she remembers from the school and go through his/hers notes. Do not let him/her sit too long over the book, encourage him/her to be focused, limit the time for each subject, if necessary. If your child doesn’t understand something, ask him to read you that part of the book, and then say how he understood it. Ask him questions, and let him arrive to conclusions on his/hers own. You should never read and present the complete solution.
Then the child should revise the lesson for the next school day. Then, pack the books, notebooks and material for tomorrow.
Spend the rest of the day without talking about school work.
If you are not at home when the child comes from school, leave a prepared lunch, and upon arrival check whether the child had eaten lunch. A child needs to learn lessons and do homework on his/her own. When you come home, check his homework. If something is wrong, do not criticize. If the lesson is not well learned, say: “It is good, you only need to improve this part and it will be great.” If the homework is incorrect, tell the child:”Let’s check this, I don’t understand something.” Incite him to find fault by himself/herself.
If the child goes to school in the afternoon, talk in the evening about the day at school. Check together if he needs your help and do it immediately. Make a schedule together for tomorrow morning. After the mandatory breakfast, a child needs to learn lessons and do the remaining homework from the day before he repeated the lessons for today, pack the books, relax and be sure to eat lunch before school.
If you do this from the very first day of school, your child will soon acquire the habit to study regularly, and you will only help when it’s needed, encourage and monitor it.

All questions put to znljubica@gmail.com  

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