Many children fell behind academically during the pandemic. Whether your child is home-schooled, learning remotely, or attending school in person, you can help your child catch up and stay on track. Utilize these tips to tutor your child in the areas your child struggles.
Find Out What Your Child Needs to Learn ― Discover the Standards
Discover information and skills children learn at your child’s grade level. These academic expectations, called standards, are what children are required to learn. To find your child’s grade level standards, visit your state’s Department of Education website. If you have trouble finding the academic standards, contact your state’s Department of Education or your local school district. Ask where you can find the academic standards or objectives your child should learn at each grade level.
Glance through the standards. The numerous standards at each grade level may seem a little overwhelming. Remember, you don’t have to tackle everything at once. Remind yourself your child is making progress with each standard your child masters. You don’t want to waste time teaching something your child already knows. You can test your child informally by asking questions and playing question games. You can also give short quizzes and observe how your child tackles schoolwork. Of course, you can also use traditional assessments such as written tests.
Build Skill Upon Skill
In education, we have something we call scaffolding. Scaffolding means we build skill upon skill. We don’t start preschoolers with trigonometry. Instead, we begin with number recognition and then move on to understanding the value of each number. Each skill builds upon future skills. For example, your child would have difficulty with exponents without mastering multiplication. Without letter recognition, your child would have trouble sounding out words. Sometimes children have not yet grasped a skill needed for future learning. We call these unlearned skills learning gaps. While learning gaps are common, it is easy to remedy them. Look at the standards from the previous grade level(s) and identify skills your child may be missing. Help your child learn those skills.
Make it Fun
Do you like sitting at a desk all day? Probably not, and neither does your child. Children are more likely to learn and retain learning when engaged, having fun, and feeling comfortable. So, incorporate movement and joy into your child’s learning activities.
Find the Sweet Spot
The sweet spot is finding that place between too complicated and too easy. If your child’s schoolwork is too easy, your child will be bored. If your child’s schoolwork is too difficult, your child will become frustrated. Finding that sweet spot between too difficult and too easy will keep your child challenged, interested, and engaged.
Share the Standard or Objective with Your Child
Let your child know what you expect your child to learn. Children are more likely to learn a skill if they know that is the expectation. You don’t have to read the standard to your child verbatim. Instead, put the objective in simple terms that your child can easily understand. If you are helping your child with homework, ask your child what the objective is. If your child does not know, ask your child’s teacher and then tell your child. Remember, when children know what we expect them to learn, they are more likely to master that skill.
Apply Actions and Senses to Learning
Involving senses and body movement increases learning and retention. When teaching a new skill, have your child hear about it, read about it, talk about it, and write about it. Then go beyond that and utilize as many senses as possible. For example, your child can use Pay-Doh or letters cut from sandpaper. Movement can involve writing numbers, math problems, letters, words, and sentences in the air.
Incorporate Physical Exercise into Learning
Research shows that physical exercise increases learning and retention. Your child can recite multiplication tables, the alphabet, names of presidents throughout history, or any other academic information while kicking a soccer ball into a net, throwing a ball into a basket, jumping rope, or any other appropriate activity. Just be sure it’s a physical activity your child enjoys.
Exercise before studying is also helpful. We are often caught in the paradigm that children should do homework, then go out and play. Research shows children learn more when they exercise before tackling schoolwork. That doesn’t mean they play, have dinner, watch TV, then do their homework. It means they study the moment they come in from playing soccer, riding their bike, shooting hoops, skateboarding, or participating in other physical activities. The theory is that children get more oxygen in their brains while exercising, which is why they learn more. However, research shows the effect of exercise reduces over time. More learning occurs when a child studies or does schoolwork right after physical activity. Less learning occurs when there is more time between exercise and studying. Send your child out to play before tackling homework, incorporate movement in lessons, and have your child take exercise breaks when studying.
Enrichment
Participating in activities, explorations, and events above and beyond everyday life and routine education enhances a child’s overall learning. Children who have enrichment experiences do better in school and on standardized tests. While cross-country road trips to places like the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, and Mount Rushmore are enrichment, you don’t have to leave your home to provide your child with enrichment. There are many ways you can provide enrichment from your home and around your community. Identify stars, constellations, and planets with your child. You and your child can observe your neighborhood’s rocks, plants, insects, and wildlife. A magnifying glass is a good investment. You can also set up small science experiments. A book on children’s science experiments is another good investment. In addition, there are places in your community that provide enrichment for children, such as zoos, museums, and planetariums.
Happiness
In education, we have something called lowering the affective filter. That means lowering or reducing a child’s anxiety, fear, or dread. Children who are happy and feel safe learn more. Keep learning and your child as blissful and stress-free as possible.
Peer Tutoring
When one child tutors another child, both children benefit academically. As one child explains a concept, algorithm, or historical event, not only does the child being tutored gain a better understanding, but the child tutoring also gains a better understanding of the topic. If you have more than one child, have them discuss and explain what they are learning to each other. I cannot overstate how important and beneficial peer tutoring and peer discussions are to learning.
General Strategies for Helping Your Child Learn
There are a variety of strategies to help your child learn and enjoy learning.Enhance learning by using graphic organizers and visual aids your child can view, create, and/or complete.
- Diagrams
- Graphs
- T-graphs
- Venn diagrams
- Charts
- Flow charts
- Videos
- Maps
- Pictures
- Timelines
- Game shows
- Field trips
- Group activities
- Games
- Peer tutoring
- Experiments
- Collages
- Posters
- Books
- Dioramas
- Paintings
- Pictures
- Maps
- Timelines
- Mobiles
- Advertisements
- Essays
- Stories
- Poetry
- Lyrics
- Costumes
- Plays
- Puppet shows
- Mock television shows
Letter Recognition, Identifying and Writing Letters
To adults, letter recognition and writing letters is a simple task that seems easy to master. You may wonder why your child writes some letters backward and confuses some letters with other letters.
Consider this: Think of everything you saw and knew before you learned about letters. Consider a cat. A cat is a cat no matter which way it faces, left or right. The same is true of everything else in life. A toy car is still a toy car whether it faces left or right. Even upside down, it’s still a toy car. Now consider the lowercase b. If you turn it facing the other way, it becomes a lowercase d, but your child may see it as a b facing the other direction. Likewise, a lowercase b turned upside-down becomes a lowercase p. However, your child may think it is an upside-down b.
Children transfer prior knowledge to new concepts. Your child learned throughout life that any given object is still that object regardless of which way it faces. Then your child is introduced to letters and confuses the lowercase b with the lowercase d. Children transfer what they know about the world to the new concept of letters. This is called transference. Transference of knowledge demonstrates intelligence. So, when children write a backward n or a backward h, it most likely means they are transferring previously learned knowledge that every object is still the same object, whether it faces left or right.
To correct the problem, explain to your child that letters face specific directions. Also, make sure your child knows left from right. Explaining that the stem or line on the letter d is on the right and the stem or line on the letter b is on the left will be futile if your child doesn’t know left from right. This is one example of why it is essential to scaffold (build skill upon skill) and identify learning gaps.
Check to see if your child knows left from right. You can do this informally in a relaxed environment. Tell your child you will ask them to do something, and you want to see how quickly they can do it. Then say, “Raise your left hand.” If your child hesitates, raises the right hand, or starts to raise one hand then the other, it is time to teach or reinforce the concept of left and right. Keep in mind that knowing right from left is used in various ways. We sound out words from left to right. We read sentences from left to right. While learning left from right may seem inconsequential, it is a critical skill.
There are easy ways to help your child learn right from left. Add a bracelet to your child’s wrist. It can be as simple as a cord tied loosely around your child’s wrist. Then let your child know the bracelet is on the left or right wrist. You can also play directional games with your child by telling your child to step forward five steps, turn left, move forward seven steps, turn right, and so on. Have the directions lead to a reward, such as a snack, toy, or surprise. Once your child has mastered the concept of left and right and understands that each letter faces a specific direction, you will see a vast improvement in your child’s ability to recognize and write letters.
Beginner Readers
Spend reading time with your child. Beginner readers have more success reading material familiar to them. Start by having your child select a story. Provide your child with background information about the story and allow your child to see and discuss the story’s pictures. Then read the story to your child before your child reads it to you. Have your child follow along as you read. Every so often, pause reading to discuss the story and ask your child to predict what will happen next. When you finish reading, ask which parts of the story were your child’s favorites.
Next time, ask your child to read the story to you. As your child reads, listen for correct pronunciation. However, remember the purpose of reading is comprehension. After your child reads, have your child retell the story to you. Doing this will allow you to check your child’s reading comprehension.
Reading Miscues and Comprehension
Understanding text is the goal of reading. When your child says the wrong word while reading, it could signify good comprehension. For instance, a child may read, “They went back to their house,” when the text says, “They went back to their home.” The child substituted house for home. This substitution is called a miscue and is a sign of comprehension. The brain works faster than the eyes move over the text. As a result, the child anticipates words based on context. The child’s brain fills in that not yet seen word with another word that makes sense, indicating the child understands the story.
If your child substitutes a word with another word that doesn’t make sense, your child needs to work on reading skills, especially comprehension. Cloze exercises help your child with reading comprehension. You can find cloze exercises on the internet or create cloze lessons for your child. Find a children’s short story and retype it with large font and double spacing. Then go through your document selecting words to replace with blank spaces. For example:
A girl picking flowers saw a bumble bee. The bee buzzed around her. Then the bumble bee buzzed around the girl’s flowers. The girl dropped all the _______________ and ran away from the ______________.
Your child can use context to determine which words belong in the blanks. Most cloze worksheets have longer text with more blanks. Some educators like removing words that are a particular part of speech, such as adjectives or pronouns. I prefer to remove words that will be easy enough for the young reader to be successful but difficult enough to be challenging. Either way, cloze activities are great for helping your child’s reading comprehension.
Help Your Child be a Better Reader
You may already know the more children read, the better readers they become. There is a little more to it than that. The more children read what they want to read, the better readers they become. When children are allowed to select the books they read, they are likelier to read more and find reading an enjoyable experience. Give your child opportunities to choose books, and build an at-home library. Take your child to the public library, bookstores, and comic book stores frequently. When a child tires of a book, it is better to encourage your child to find something more interesting to read. Remember, the more children read material they find interesting, the better readers they become.