Dinner is completed and the kitchen is cleaned and I'm ready to collapse into a soft chair with a good book or maybe a movie. Before I do, I ask the children, Do you have any homework you need help with?. Ninety percent of the time the answer is yes. I have spent until the wee hours of the morning helping with school projects, posters or typing term papers.
This school year, our family includes a daughter who graduated from college last May, a son who is a junior at a university away from home, another son who is starting junior college and living at home and the youngest son who is in the eighth grade. You would think that the homework crutch would lighten up around here. No way....
This summer, my son who is a junior at Baylor University, was taking a history class. At 2:30 in the morning the phone rang.
Hi, Mom, did I wake you up? I'm faxing a paper for you to proofread. Tell me if it needs to be corrected or revised. I have to turn it in at 1:00 this afternoon.
Sleepily, I hung up the phone and went back to bed. Surely, I am dreaming. When I awakened in the morning, the paper was there. It wasn't a dream. But it is representative of his learning style. Many projects were completed throughout middle school and high school in the middle of the night.
As we help our children learn, we need to know our children's learning styles and try to help them develop skills to enhance their education.
1. Read to young children daily.
2. Encourage children to listen to a variety of music and the sounds around them.
3. Encourage young children to play with puzzles or use blocks and clay and build creatively.
4. Develop vocabulary skills. Not only knowing what a word means but how to use it in a sentence correctly.
5. Help children learn to study effectively for a test: review notes, color-code essential information with highlighters, save old tests, study with other students, study at their best time (a.m., afternoon, evening), memorize information only when they are rested and use memory strategies such as acronyms, key words, linking ideas and rhyming words.
6. Discuss how to do projects before starting them, making sure they have all their supplies before the stores close.
7. Check out the resources at home for projects and try to be creative with using what is available.
8. Use a tape recorder to tape class lectures if your child learns better auditorially than visually.
9. Encourage stimulating discussions about new information learned during that day at school or at work.
10. Enrich your children's education with art, drama, music or science programs available in your community.
I am sure that I will be spending many hours this school year helping look up information, running all over town trying to find a specific idea for a school project or even receiving an occasional fax in the middle of the night. But as each year goes by, the time spent is less and with each graduation, I am glad that I could be a part of their education.