Homework Help: 5 Tips For Parents
If you're on a tight budget this year, you won't be able to hire a student or tutor to help your children with their homework. Instead, you'll have to make do with homework help as a family. Here are 5 practical tips for parents to keep those homework sessions from turning into a drama.
1- Find the right moment
It is not possible for a child who is out of school to go straight to homework. Before you ask him to get back to work, give him a break to play and do whatever he likes.
This relaxing time is the first of our 5 homework tips for parents, but it doesn't have to be very long... Fifteen minutes is enough for elementary school kids and half an hour for middle schoolers to decompress after their day.
The homework help will then be much easier, as your child will approach their exercises and lessons more calmly.
2- Choose the right place
Children who have been sitting for hours during the day may not want to sit down at their desks to do their homework.
If it is possible and does not interfere with the smooth running of family life, it is more pleasant for the child to sit down in a living room, on the dining room or living room table or even outside if the weather is nice.
Just make sure the setting is calm and conducive to concentration, with no TV on or music or other distractions nearby.
The choice of setting is the second of our 5 homework tips for parents because it allows children to do this schoolwork in a more relaxed state of mind than in school or college.
3- Identify your strengths and weaknesses
If you want to provide real homework help for your child, you need to know what his strengths and weaknesses are. This will allow you to focus your support in the subjects where he or she is struggling.
In addition, for your tutoring to be effective, you also need to determine whether his memory is more visual or auditory. This way, you can help him retain his lessons in his own way.
In any case, all you have to do is be present at homework time and stay close to your child so that he can ask you for help if needed.
But be careful to only intervene if necessary! You should not do his homework for him or pressure him. It is very important to give him independence so that he learns to work independently and solve the exercises himself.
4- Adopt a positive and concrete approach
Even if your child is not strong in all subjects, you should not overwhelm him/her with criticism, at the risk of making him/her completely phobic of math or spelling!
On the contrary, to build a child's self-confidence, you need to emphasize the positives, show them that they are succeeding in some subjects and are therefore capable of learning and progressing in others.
To keep homework from becoming a source of conflict and drama, you should always keep your cool, encourage him and praise him for his successes. This calm and positive attitude is one of the 5 most useful homework tips for parents.
Also, to make homework help and learning easier, it is worthwhile to adopt a more concrete and fun method than school. For example, if your child needs to learn about perimeter, area, or measurements, it's worth choosing concrete examples related to their interests.
You can prove to him that what he learns at school is useful in everyday life by suggesting that he calculate the perimeter and area of a soccer field or the measurements of ingredients to make a cake (by multiplying or dividing the proportions).
5- Using digital resources
Because children already spend so much time in front of screens, parents and grandparents are sometimes reluctant to use a tablet or mobile app for homework help.
Yet there are interesting resources online to help kids review multiplication tables or English vocabulary, for example... This is the last of our 5 homework tips for parents, but it should be applied with discretion.
A digital medium usually motivates children and can help them retain what needs to be memorized. So it would be a shame to go without, as long as you choose reliable sources developed by teachers like logicieleducatif.fr (see link below).
