As we head back to another brand new academic year, you might be looking for ways you can help your child get on well at school.
A lot of the time it can feel like things are out of our hands as parents once our children walk through the school gates. But there are some things we can do and skills we can teach them to help them do their best and get the most out of their time at school.
1. Make sure they get enough sleep
One of the best things you can do for your children to help them get on well at school is to make sure they get enough sleep each night.
Primary school children need around 10 hours of sleep a night, so set a bedtime that allows them to get that much sleep based on when they need to wake up in the morning.
Then build a bedtime routine together to help them wind down, ready for a good night’s sleep.
As we sleep we move through cycles of three different sleep stages – light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep.
It’s during REM sleep that our brains work to consolidate our memories and the things we’ve learned that day. So it’s really important for our children to sleep well and get enough REM sleep to help them retain the things they’ve been learning at school.
2. Encourage them to write things down
If your child is revising for a test, whether it’s a spelling test or times tables for younger children, or SATS and GCSEs if they’re older, then encourage them to write things down as they study.
Go over the list of spellings with them and ask them to write each word out a few times.
For older children, get them to copy out key facts and important information from their textbooks into a notebook.
Studies have shown that the process of writing things down like this helps solidify the information in our brains. But it does have to be written by hand, not typed on a computer, to have the full effect.
It’s all down to the different things our brains have to process when we write things by hand. Writing things down involves a combination of fine motor skills, touch sensation, and visual perception, and all that complex sensory information that our brains have to process means we’re more likely to store the information linked to it ready to use again later.
3. Teach them to slow down and focus
We have a tendency to think that multitasking is a good thing, that it makes us more efficient and lets us get more done in less time.
As it turns out though, the opposite is true.
We’re much more productive when we focus 100% on one task at a time.
Switching between tasks divides our focus and breaks our flow, so each time we switch it takes us a while to get back ‘in’ to what we were doing.
So teaching our children to slow down and focus on one thing at a time will really help them when it comes to doing their school work. When they give their full attention to the piece of work they need to be doing they’ll have far more success than if they’re trying to jump between tasks or do things like work with the tv on.