It can be confusing to keep up with all that is needed for your child to develop and grow at school.
Here are some tips to help you to help your child:
- If you are unsure of the concepts yourself ask the teacher to show you – remember the teacher works with these concepts on a daily basis.
- If you are unsure of how to teach or reinforce concepts at home, ask the teacher for tips, methods or recommendations.
- Use the Internet to come up with new and exciting ways for your child to learn concepts. Ways that are different to how they were introduced in class.
- Create your own parent network so that you can assist each other. This helps keep track of homework, understanding concepts, building friendships, study buddies (learning buddies) and more.
- If your child is struggling, make notes and bring these to the teacher’s attention. The work with the teacher to address concepts that your child does not understand.
- If your child is struggling, invest in extra lessons; don’t wait until the later grades for tutoring. Your child will have to return to the basics in order to understand the current concepts if the problem areas are not addressed as soon as possible.
- Homework should be done in the afternoon. Try not to wait until the evenings as most children are tired and unable to focus at that time. Information is lost when children are not able to pay attention or are too tired. If you are unable to do this, ask a relative or friend. Another option is to hire someone who can assist your child. Also look into aftercare facilities that offer homework assistance.
- When you work with your child, work in small sections with breaks in between – if you spend too much time on a certain topic (longer than 15 minutes) some information may be forgotten.
- Do not ignore or underestimate the importance of the Foundation Phase (Grades 1-3).
- Intermediate Phase homework should be guided and the child should be able to do some of the work independently. By the end of Grade 6 a child should be able to do the majority of their homework independently, but may still require some assistance.