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Homework; does it matter?

A down-to-earth approach for teachers and parents Well, does it?

This article is written with educators and parents in mind.

It gathers an assortment of practical ideas to ease typical difficulties surrounding homework. What is presented is realistic advice, mindful of the kids who struggle with concentration, learning issues, or feel so fatigued by the time they arrive home from school that an emotional blow out over homework is just a heartbeat away. Students with learning or emotional difficulties do it so much tougher than those without. As a result, so do their mothers, fathers and teachers. Successful homework approaches depend on of educators and parents synchronising their communication and attitudes, and recognising that homework is a highly complex undertaking. Without us, the adults, pooling our efforts and understandings we shouldn’t be shocked when our kids become expert at avoiding and sabotaging it.

What’s happening in your child’s bedroom?

Parental expectations that are consistently higher than their child can achieve simply create antagonism. Ironically, bedroom tidiness is often the trigger for broader based friction. Decide how tidy the bedroom really needs to be. When you ask your child to clean up, think about whether the task is too big for them. If the mess is big enough for you to roll your eyes and think, "What a mess, where would I start?" then it's too big for your child to tackle alone, whether they are 6 or 16 years of age. In addition, it becomes more daunting if your child battles with spatial, organisational, distractibility and persistence difficulties.

Helping your anxious child: information for parents

Anxiety is a normal part of children's behavioural and emotional development, and as children get older, their concerns grow broader. A younger child may be worried about a spelling test, a soccer match, or catching the school bus for the first time. An older child may worry about a school camp, failing in a test, impressing peers or starting a new sport. These anxieties are common, even signs that your child's development is on track.

Asperger Syndrome: building social stories with students

The aim of Social Stories is to develop social understanding by helping children to 'read' understand social situations. Social stories provide information about social situations that the child may find confusing or difficult to understand. The situation is described simply, with a focus on just a few key points. The goal of the story is to explain confusing situations, make the child feel more comfortable and confident, and suggest some appropriate responses to the situations. It is important when introducing a Social Story that is introduced in a relaxed, positive environment where the student can "learn" the social situation before experiencing it: they are not designed to process situations after the child has made poor choices of behaviour. Situations from which the child withdraws, or attempts to escape from may be appropriate targets for a social story.

Social skills: developing your child's conversation skills

Most children develop age appropriate social skills by observing, asking questions, and interacting with a wide range of people who allow them to build a conversational repertoire to draw upon. For a variety of reasons, some children lag behind in this process. It may be due to temperamental factors such as shyness or behavioural reasons such as decreased self-control. Problems may be displayed with greeting, conversation building, lack of self-correction, timing, boundary violation, context, or some other social error. Having conversations with your child is the best way to model appropriate skills. In addition, you can coach your child to develop better skills. This handout provides some practical suggestions.

Listening skills: "Hey, are you listening"

Some children seem to be chronically bad listeners. It is crucial for a child to develop good listening skills in order to cope with the demands of school and as a basis for strong literacy skills. Good listeners are more likely to follow instructions, and to be able to express their ideas well in words. Listening is related to memory, too: it is very hard to remember something that you have not heard well in the first place. In fact sometimes poor listening is wrongly described as poor memory, particularly by teachers.

Tips to manage the emotion and behaviour of students

Tips to manage the emotion and behaviour of students identified with:

• Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
• Oppositional Defiant Disorder
• Asperger Syndrome

Due to their tireless work at the coal face teachers know what many medical professionals and parents are now discovering. That is, the face of each of these conditions constantly shifts, and what's more, it is not unusual to work with a student who battles with two or three of these conditions.
Download PDF file.

STOP THINK DO traffic lights in the classroom save lives!

A positive social climate in the classroom saves lives!
This sounds like an exaggerated claim, but long-term research and experience with children supports it. It shows that children who relate well together and make friends are less likely to have serious problems that ruin their lives; these include delinquency, criminality, drug dependence, school drop-out, low self-esteem and motivation, loneliness, depression and psychopathology of various types which may last into adolescence and adulthood.

Parenting Ideas for Today

It All Starts with Listening
I know that our children have many choices about whom they share their thoughts and feelings with. When they were in primary school, their parents most often heard about the events and concerns that were nearest their heart. But as they got older, parental ears were more and more often replaced by their friends and classmates, teachers and coaches and parents are increasingly left out of the loop. It's not easy, but it's natural.

Helping to Build Your Child's Self Esteem

Self esteem develops from children's experiences and how others react to them. If children have successful experiences and they get messages from others that say 'you are great' then their self esteem increases. If they experiences failures and negative reactions from others, their self esteem decreases.

BLITZ your Times Tables
Notes for parents and teachers

This program is based on three very important findings from the research:

1. NO ONE actually enjoys learning times tables - it's something like cleaning teeth or using sun lotion, your child JUST HAS TO.
2. Bribery works. Students learn faster if there is something they value at the end of it. Money preferably.
3. The best learning builds on success - that's why we teach Times Tables in such a funny order, not 2,3,4,5,6,7 and so on to 12.

The Explosive Child in Preschool

When a child's skills in a particular area lag behind, we know the benefits of providing extra support. In his book, Dr Ross Greene explains that "The Explosive Child" is not choosing to behave in this way, but rather has not yet developed the skills of flexibility and tolerating frustration. Thus our role, as with any developmental delay, is to help the child develop these skills to an age appropriate level.

Helping Brothers and Sisters Get Along

Actually, there is a great deal parents can do, since sibling relationships are shaped in large part by parents' attitudes and actions. Without intending to, many parents reinforce conflict. They may fail to set adequate limits on fighting, allowing one child to dominate. They may appear, from their children's point of view, to favour one child, place unfair demands on an older sibling or simply not listen.

Helping Your Child With Comprehension

Here are some ways that you can help your child develop the skills to understand, process and recall information when they are reading. Some ideas work best with readers and novels, and some work best with "information" texts. Some will even work with taped TV programs... maybe not with The Simpsons, though.

Helping Your Child With Homework

Homework is set for all sorts of reasons, not just because "that's what teachers do". It should be a chance for students to consolidate or revise work they have covered in class, and it provides opportunities for students to extend their skills in different areas of interest. Sometimes it will be interesting and engaging, and other times it will be just tedious and hard work. Homework demands self organisation and time management: these skills take time to develop, and your child may need support when they first start to do set homework.

10 "Hot Tips" for Managing Your Child's Behaviour

You've read the books, talked to other parents, and generally tried most things. Have a close look this week at how many of these strategies you use. Remember: the best way to change your child's behaviour is to change your own behaviour. All the best strategies involve setting routines, rewarding the behaviour you want to encourage, avoiding confrontations and modelling the behaviour you want to see in your child.

101 Cool Ways to Learn Spelling Words

1. Put your words in sentences.
2. Underline all the vowels. Make a graph showing how many times each vowel is used (that's a,e,i,o,u)
3. Same thing - only this time underline consonants (that's all the rest)

Angry Children, Worried Parents:
Helping Families Manage Anger

Parents worry when their children struggle with anger. Angry feelings and behaviour can be especially challenging for children who have learning and attention problems. To help parents address this problem, Dr. Sam Goldstein, Dr. Robert Brooks, and Sharon Weiss, have teamed up to co-author a new book, Angry Children, Worried Parents: Seven Steps to Help Families Manage Anger (Specialty Press, 2004).

Auditory Processing Disorder

Children and adults with auditory processing disorder (APD) have problems comprehending speech. The concept of APD is often difficult for parents, educators and other professionals to understand. A child with an auditory processing disorder has normal hearing and intelligence, but impaired ability to attend to, recognise, analyse and interpret information that they hear. This is probably because of the way the child's central nervous system is "wired". No one really knows why this deficit in sensory processing in the brain occurs. Previously, APD was often called Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAP-D).

Tips on Exam Preparation

The following are some useful pointers for preparing of the coming exams.

Organisation

1. Allow enough time to revise - start early enough that you don't run out of time to cover all the material before the exam.
2. Clarify exam format and requirements - make sure you know how long the exam is, where it will be held and at what time, what resources you are allowed to take in with you, and what areas of course content will be assessed.
3. Plan revision - structure your revision using your diary or a calendar so that all topics are covered.

The Dragon
That’s what I call my brother’s Asperger Syndrome

It was a dark and stormy night, and I lay with my eyes squeezed tightly shut. The lightning flashed so brightly I could see it through my eyelids. I burrowed deeper into my blankets. A deafening peel of thunder rolled across the sky, and I let out a small whimper. My imagination got the better of me, and I began to hear things outside the window. The howling wind became a werewolf, searching for its next victim, the tree scraping on the window was some dark stranger trying to get inside.

Friendship Quiz:
What sort of friend are you?

Most students think there’s little they can do to stop the bully, or a group of students demonstrating mean behaviours, without risking becoming a target or losing their own status in the group.

But really, there’s a lot YOU can do to become a better friend to everyone.

The first step is to understand what roles you may be playing in your group of friends. Take the following quiz and find out!

Dysgraphia: Compensating Strategies for Students

Most commonly, the term Specific Learning Difficulty incorporates the conditions described as Dyslexia (specific reading disorder), Dyscalculia (specific calculation disorder) Dyspraxia (speech) and Dysgraphia (specific writing disorder). This group of disorders affect language and learning and is thought to affect between 3 per cent and 10 per cent of the population. Such a diagnosis is sought when a noticeable discrepancy becomes apparent between an individual's intelligence and their acquisition of reading, writing, spelling and maths skills despite support by sound teaching practice.

20 SPARKLING IDEAS to inspire self-motivation in students

Research has also shown that the level of motivation a student walks into the classroom with can be changed, for the better or worse, depending on what occurs in that classroom. More than anything else, a quality relationship is what enables cooperative behaviours and motivation to be stretched and reshaped. Healthy connections bubble to the surface as a smile, a wink, a silly face, a nudge, a dare, a joke, a thumbs up, a kind or reassuring comment. The benefits arising from a quality relationship are remarkable, and are far more potent than special efforts to attack motivation directly.

REPEATING A SCHOOL YEAR: a difficult decision

When a student is struggling with their school work the possibility of repeating a year level is sometimes suggested by parents and/or teachers.

The decision is seldom an easy one as in most situations there are things to be said in favour of keeping the student with their age peers, and advantages in arranging for them to repeat a year level. Often the decision is hard because the arguments for either course of action are quite evenly balanced.