Of the many aspects of parenting, one of the most important is making sure your children get a good education, but it is not always easy to know which things are most important to achieve this. That is why we want to delve into some of the possible measures that can be taken to improve the quality of parenting learning and to make the most of the possibilities of offering children a good academic education.
How to take advantage of children’s education
- Time to meet the teachers
Perhaps the most important step in ensuring a good education for your children is taking time to meet their teachers. Teachers spend many hours with the little ones and have an important influence on them. Teachers reinforce many of the values taught at home and can have a great impact on a child’s emerging sense of identity. It is essential, therefore, that parents communicate openly with teachers and discuss topics such as children’s traits or needs. In this sense, it may also be important to talk about the educational goals that you hope your children will have or that the teacher will have for them.
- Find out the essential objectives of the course
Time spent each day on homework can be a major source of stress for families. Children often need a lot of guidance while working on their homework , which can become downright difficult if the parents are unfamiliar with the topics at work. Although you don’t have to be an expert in every field of study, you can best help your children if you have at least some basic idea of what they are learning. Ask what the focus of each semester is or find out what the essential objectives of the course are. If you know, for example, that it is essential for your child to learn multiplication tables in third grade, then make sure you have fun math tests in the car or flash cards on hand so you can play and review together.
- Plan additional activities
Once you know what curriculum your child will be studying during the course, you can plan additional activities that enrich their learning . Plan a trip to a science museum to add value to biology class, or add an extra dimension to what she’s learning with alphabet activities, cooking world, or math skills-enhancing games. You can also consider having a tutor to help deepen your understanding of key areas such as language.
Educate and learn without blocking or saturating
One of the most commonly overlooked requirements for successful learning is the need for downtime . In order to process all the important information that we learn during the day, our minds need to rest. This is why experts never recommend things like bingeing on studying the night before an exam, for example. If we accumulate a lot of knowledge in a hurry without time to organize it in our mind, we end up losing all that information, or in the best of cases, we end up confusing it with other data.
That is why it is important also for children to have free time after school hours for physical and outdoor activities. To enjoy a good rest … Never forget this point, because rest and disconnection are essential for successful learning .
Each child is unique and has a certain learning style. Try to accommodate your child’s style by discussing strengths and weaknesses with their teachers. Perhaps test anxiety is a recurring problem at home, so you could help your children deal with that feeling by helping them better organize the study hours before an exam. If you have shy children, you can request that the school psychologist teach self-help, meditation, or relaxation classes to lose fear and gain confidence.
At home, if you know your kids will have a hard time staying focused on homework, set up a work center in the dining room that doesn’t lead to isolation and allows you to keep an eye on whether or not the time is really useful from time to time. You can also work with teachers to plan what is best for each individual child, as this not only helps students, but also serves to strengthen the education system. And it is that we will actually spend less effort and see better results when we teach children in a way that meets their true individual needs .
With all this, it will not be difficult to realize that a good education requires a very committed triangle made up of parents, teachers and students. It is vital that all participants in the educational community, in one way or another, are fully involved in the process. Understanding and good communication are keys to helping children learn. When we know what to expect from things as important as the curriculum, we can plan activities to complement it and recognize the individual needs of each student, laying the foundation for a good and rewarding education.
