Is your child going into a mixed grade classroom next year?  Are you concerned about what this will mean for your child’ learning?   Here is a list of benefits and barriers to learning in a multi-age classroom and a description of the type of student who benefits most from this arrangement.

Multi-age classroom.

Mostly this means that the class contains students from two grades.  Sometimes it can mean that there are three grades in one class.  One of the best classes I ever taught was a ‘three grade’ classroom.  When a class is evenly divided between two or more grades the teacher knows that he or she has to have different expectations for each grade.  It is when a class contains only one or two children from one grade that parents need to know exactly why their child was chosen to be in that class.

There can be many reasons for putting a child into a different grade- nt all of them are based on sound educational practice!  So, if you are concerned about the class your child has been put in make sure that you get the information you need about why this happened.

Benefits of multi-age classrooms

*  Not all children learn at the same pace.  Your child might benefit from being with children who are at his or her level of learning

* Children learn from each other and older children can help younger children learn while benefiting their own learning. Teaching is a great way to learn.

* Having the same teacher for two or more years in a row can be a real benefit to a child’s learning. The teacher gets to know the child and time at the beginning of the year is not wasted.

* Multi-age classroom encourage responsibility for learning.  Children are often given projects and expected to carry out research on their own

* Friendships – children can make friends with older or younger children depending on their maturity

*  Sense of security – children feel less threatened by change and are able to concentrate more on learning

Barrier to learning in multi-age classrooms

*  Noise level – because there may be children working on different projects at the same time it is easy for teh noise level to increase.  A good teacher will make sure that it stays withing a ’safe’ level.

* Rigidity of teaching – in a multi-age classroom teachers need to be flexible and open to new ways of working.  Some teachers find this difficult to do and struggle to keep every child learning at capacity.

* Poor home school communication. It can be harder for teachers to let parents know what is going on in their classrooms when there is so much happening.  Parents need to make an extra effort to learn what their child is doing in class.

What type of learner benefits most from a multi-age classroom?

Before I discuss this I want you to know that I loved teaching in multi-age classrooms.  I found that they fitted my teaching style. So, assuming that you have a teacher who also enjoys teaching this way- these students will benefit most…

A student who …

* likes to work as part of a group

* makes friend easily

* does not need to be told what to do all the time

* comes from a multi-age family (has siblings) and is used to others having different needs

* Likes project work and the research that goes with it

What type of learner will find a multi-age classroom a difficult learning space?

A student who …

* is used to being told what to do and when to do it

* an only child who may not have had experience working with other children of a different age

* a child who likes to learn on their own

What setting is best for your child?

Next post I will be discussing how parents should react to the two types of classroom.

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Soon your child will be going to a new classroom: will it be the type of classroom that matches his or her learning needs?

What is the most effective and motivating learning environment for your child?  That depends on how your child learns best and how different types of classroom meet different learning needs.  Here is a quick run down of how single grade classrooms can create benefits and barriers to learning for a child.

Single grade classrooms

This is the type of classroom that you are familiar with. All the students are the same age and are taught by the same teacher for the whole year.

Benefits

* Children stay with their friends as they move up the school.  This can give them a sense of security.

* The curriculum is straightforward, all the children are taught the same thing.

* Teachers do not have to prepare multiplee lesson plans

* It is easier to understand your child’s progress against other children of the same age

* Teaching can be very directed and focused on specific curriculum aims

* You were probably taught in a single grade classroom so yo will not feel anxious about your child being in one.

*  If you have had other children in the same grade you know what goes on in the classroom, and what to expect from the teacher

Barriers

* Not all children develop at the same pace. The level of the material being taught might not match what your child needs to learn

*  Your child may be stuck with the same ‘unfriendly’ student as last year

*  Children do not get the benefit of working with older, more experienced students

* Children have only one standard to measure them selves against, that of the whole class

* These classes tend to be teacher centered.  The teacher sets the curriculum and delivers it. It can be hard to accommodate individual differences

*  The children who just scrape into this grade because of their birth date may always be the ‘babies’ and the ones who are not ready to learn

What type of learner benefits most from single grade classrooms?

The child who -

* has parents who understand and expect their child to be in a single grade classroom

* has the same close group of friends in and out of class

* is an ‘average’ learner because this is who the teacher directs her class lessons to

* who has brothers and sisters at home who provide different perspectives on learning

* who learns best in a traditional, directed way

What type of learner does not benefit from a single grade classroom?

The child who -

* is either an ‘above average’ or ‘below average’ learner because he or she may be bored or confused by lessons directed at the grade level

* the more mature child who needs friends who are older than him

* the immature child who still needs the type of teaching approach used in earlier grades

* likes a more self directed approach to learning

* has been left out of the groups of friends in the class

* the ‘different’ learner who does not learn the same way as the majority of the other students

You may not have a choice about the type of classroom your child goes into, but  understanding how it will help or hinder your child’s learning,  gives you an insight into your child’s learning issues.

Next post – mixed grade classrooms and the benefits and barriers they offer to learning.

The new school year is about to begin, and that means that your child will be getting homework!

Homework can create enormous stress in families, stress that can be avoided by following these six simple rules.

1.  Do not do your child’s homework for them.

This is a definite no-no, but I know many parents who, exasperated by their child’s problems and the pressures of school, do some or all of their child’s homework.  Please stop!  Look over the next four ‘rules’, following them will mean that you never have to do this again!

2.  Know the homework policy

You need to know the school policy around homework.  How much is your child expected to do?  What about nights he is doing other things such as football practice?  Who will give homework and how will it be marked?

Any teacher worth his or her salt will be happy to talk to you about this.

3.  Communicate with your child’s teacher

The teacher needs to know if your child is finding the homework too easy or too hard.  He or she will not be able to adjust your child’s homework unless you discuss thee issues.  You don’t have to visit the school, although you can, a short note stating the problem should get you the changes your child needs.

4.  Don’t let it take too long

Believe it or not homework is not meant to be a punishment.  Your child should be able to finish his work in a reasonable time so that he has time for other things.  If your child consistently takes longer than is expected (see rule #2) you need to do something about it. Try using rule #3.

5.  Keep homework in perspective

Homework is important. The best homework is a way your child can practice the skills that have been learned in school.  Except for some types of project work homework should not be about learning anything new.  Don’t get upset, or let your child get upset, when homework is too difficult – or too easy.  In both cases it is time to tell the teacher and review what type and quantity of work your child is being given.

And, almost as important as rule #1-

6.  Don’t try to teach your child how to do their homework

For starters, that is the job of the teacher, and the way you may try to help your child could be very different from the way the teacher taught your child.  The confusion this situation causes can lead to frustration, anger and even tears.

More about what to do when your child is having problems with homework in the next post.

School’s out!! – Or it will be in the next few days, and you need to know how to handle the changes that are happening.

The last few weeks of the school year are special. Students may be completing exams, getting ready to change schools,and beginning to relax more in class as the summer approaches. Learning may look as if it is slowing down or even not happening at all. Students can become restless, even somewhat lost, as the start to loose the regular rhythm of school life that has determined the structure of their day. for most of the year.

It is a difficult time for teachers too. There are end of year meetings to plan for next year, teachers may be leaving and there are the report cards to write and send out. All this on top of the out of school activities and visits that take place as the weather improves and the year’s work gets completed.

These changes can make life difficult for parents who are trying to keep to their normal schedule and who may not be directly involved in these summer preparations. So here are some tips on how to handle this time of endings and new beginnings that your school aged child is experiencing right now.

1. Try to join in the excitement of the upcoming summer.
You might be looking forward to a couple of weeks vacation but your child is looking forward to much more than that. He or she sees an endless summer spread out in front of them, a summer that is ripe with possibilities, places to go and things to see. Try to see the summer through your child’s eyes even if, for you, it means trying to find childcare or summer camps to send your child to. Understanding how and why your child is excited about the holidays will give you a much better grounding for the inevitable conversations and disagreements that summer can bring.

2. Don’t worry about ‘learning loss’
Yes, sure, kids ‘forget’ stuff they have learned the year before but they don’t forget a lot and they normally forget the stuff that is not worth remembering anyway. Most teachers can get kids back on track within the first few days or weeks of he new school year. Learning doesn’t stop because your child is out of school, it just changes from formal school-type learning to informal (and possible more important!) out-of school type learning. Just make sure that your child is not stuck in front of the TV screen all day and that he or she has time to spend with friends and family doing fun stuff and all will be well.

Oh, you might also want to encourage some reading for fun, perhaps you can each rad the same book and have your own mini book club as a way of encouraging reading and language development?

3. Keep a calendar in view
For children the summer seems endless, then suddenly it is all over. Having a calendar hanging around where it could be seen and used to note important dates such as trips, visits, back to school planning etc. helps your child, and you, get a handle on how much time is left to do things and maybe even plan so that the end of summer panic does not happen. No guarantee that it will work, but at least you tried!

4. Set some basic guidelines.
I am sure that you have heard this before but it is worth repeating. You have things to do, your daily routine is probably not changing as much as that of your child, so you all need to be clear about who is responsible for what. For instance, who will clear the dishwasher now that there are more dishes to clean? How will bedtime change and when will exceptions be allowed? How is the house going to be used? Which space is just for you and which space is just for your child? All this enforced togetherness can be difficult without a bolt hole for use in emotional emergencies. Talk about what rules or guidelines need to be in place, and be ready to accept dome that your child suggests.

5. Relax!
Your child will be relaxing, in fact he or she might be so relaxed that they spend most of the day doing nothing much at all .. and how annoying is that!

Here you are, working all the hours of the day and possibly the night, to put bread on the table … … … Well I am sure you know how it gos, every schoolchild does as they have probably heard it, or similar versions, spoken many, many times.

Relax, it is the summer and if you have set some mutually agreed upon ground rules, trust your child to have the responsibility to live up to them.

If your child fails to live up to the rules you need to discover how to help him or her take responsibility for their actions.

This video shows how comprehensive assessments allow children to demonstrate all their skills. As the video says, this form of assessment takes time but the results are worth it.

Just though that you might like to look at a different form of assessment than the one you will be getting on your child’s report card.

Which would you prefer?

There are many reasons why children behave badly, but one that is often overlooked is that the behaviour is caused by a learning difficulty.

Let me tell you about David.

David was about to be thrown out of his kindergarten class (kindergarten class!) because his behaviour was so bad. He kept annoying other children in class and, when disciplined in the playground, ignored the playground supervisors when they told him to stop. This boy had been in front of the school Principal many times and it never made a difference. David still bugged the other children.

His parents were desperate. They had tried everything they could think of to get their son to fit into the classroom, but nothing seemed to be working. They were unsure that a learning assessment would be any use but they were willing to give it a try.

It was fun working with David. He wanted to be good but he also wanted to see what he could get away with. His mother was very brave, she sat in the room and never interfered with the process even when it was obvious that she wanted to.

I discovered that David was a bright boy with lots of ideas and with a burning need to relate to others. The problem was that he had no idea how to do this because he had difficulties understanding what was said to him. Sure, he looked like he understood what people were saying to him, he nodded his head when asked if he understood, and he seemed contrite when he was disciplined for hitting another child, but it was all an act. He had learned how to behave, he was upset not at what he had done, but at being told off. He had no idea why he was in trouble because he didn’t understand the words.

The reason he bugged kids in class was because he wanted to see what they were doing so that he could do the same, he had no idea what the teacher had told him to do, not because he hadn’t listened but because he was unable to process complex verbal inputs.

Poor David. How could he be good when he didn’t understand why he was bad? He was trying to connect to the other children the only way he knew, by physical contact. The other children of course saw it as bullying and would run from him.

The story has a happy ending. When parents and teachers understood that David’s bad behaviour was a result of his verbal learning difficulty we were able to discuss ways of helping him develop the language skills he needed. Meanwhile, both his parents and his teachers learned how to talk to David in ways that he could understand.

The last I heard he was still in school and making great progress!

Not all behaviour problems are caused by learning difficulties, but many are, and they are often unrecognized and untreated.

Do you know that most of the people in the prison either have difficulties reading or some other learning issue!

If you are worried about your child’s behaviour you might want to use my free Parent Starter kit check how well he learns.

Very soon your child will be getting his end of year report card, possibly the most important of all the year’s report cards. But will you understand what it says, will you understand the code?

About 80% of parents never fully understand their child’s report card. In all my dealings with parents talking report cards (and to a slightly lesser extent, parent-teacher conferences) creates a very lively discussion. For most parents the report card is the main means of knowing what their child is doing in school, but very few of them actually get the information they need and want.

The main reason is that report cards are written in code. Teachers, stressed st having to write thirty or more report cards make the task manageable by using words and phrases that are meaningful to them but make no sense to parents.

For instance, teachers may be instructed to tell parents whether or not their child has ‘achieved the acceptable standard’ for the year.

What does that mean?

Whose acceptable standard?
An acceptable standard in what?
How has this been achieved?
Why is the child’s work only ‘acceptable’?
What ‘acceptable’ work are we talking about?

This is just one example of how teachers use code in report cards. The classic one is a standard, if old, joke in classrooms across the world. You know the one. The one that says ‘Your child is trying’.

For parents is may mean that their child is working hard and doing his best, for teachers is was (is?) code for ‘I wish your child would stop bugging me!’

I know that teachers don’t normally use code words on purpose. It is just that using them makes writing report cards easier, and sometimes they are even directed what code words to use. These words and phrases have meaning for teachers, and teachers think that they mean the same to you.

So, when you get your child’s report card look for the code words. They are not hard to miss. Then make sure that you contact the teacher to find out exactly what they meant to say and get them to say it in words that you understand.

You need to know what your child is doing in school, don’t be put off by ‘teacher code’.

You are probably giving your child help with their homework, most parents do. But you may be missing the one, sure sign that what you are doing is not helping your child learn.

Helping your child with homework is a good way to make sure that your child is keeping up with their schoolwork, but it can be a hassle. I have known many parents become frustrated and angry when they try to help their child do their work.

You want your child to produce their best work so that they get good marks, and you encourage your child to try hard, make their work look good, finish their work on time, and make sure that they hand it in on the right day.

Doing all these is fine, as long as you and your child are happy and getting along well. But this is not always the case. When they get home parents are often tired after a hard days work and helping a child with homework is the last thing they feel like doing. So, rather than helping with a good will and with lots of patience, they may provide support grudgingly and, if their child does not respond in the way they want, stat to get frustrated and angry.

I have had phone calls from parents when all I could hear was quiet sobbing on the other end of the line!

It didn’t take me long to figure out what was going on. The homework hassle had got out of hand and the mother was so frustrated with her child that she was desperate for help. She had no idea what she could do. She told me that she had tried everything to get her daughter to do her work but had only succeeded in making her daughter angry and herself upset.

I am sure that she was not the only parent who has found themselves in this situation.

To all you parents who have found yourself in a similar situation – and you know who you are- I have some very important words to say.

If you or your child are not happy about the help you give with homework it is not working!

You are wasting your time and your energy as well as putting your relationship with your child in jeopardy.

If you are in this situation, stop now! Stop doing things that do not feel good. Neither you nor your child are benefiting from the situation.

If you haven’t completed the free Parent Starter Kit at the top of this blog now might be a good time to download it.

The solution to this problem is very easy to say but more difficult to do.

When parents want to help their children learn the first thing most of them do is hire a tutor, and, unfortunately, they may be wasting their money.

Now, as far as I know, the hourly cost for tutoring is between $25 (what a high school student might charge) and $60 (the amount a learning expert might charge). This means that the cost of hiring a tutor can be quite high, especially as the best tutors need to work with children at least twice a week.

But are you sure that this money is being well spent? Are you sure that your child needs a tutor? Are you sure that hiring a tutor is the best way to help your child learn?

Before you start spending money on tutoring for your child you need to be sure that hiring a tutor will be beneficial for your child, and for you.

Don’t get me wrong, hiring a tutor can be an excellent was of giving your child the learning support he or she needs to do well in school. There are some excellent tutors, and one of them might be able to offer just what your child needs to become a better learner. But before you start looking for a tutor, and paying for one, make sure that this is the type of support your child needs.

Here are three reasons why you could be wasting your money.

1. Your child needs help with more than one subject
Most tutors are subject specialists. They know their subject really well and have plenty of experience in helping children learn it. So, if your child is having trouble with one subject, then hiring a tutor to help him or her catch up could be a good idea.

BUT, if your child is struggling in more than one subject, for example, if he or she is behind in math and writing, then the chances are that tutoring is not be best way to help your child. Your child may need a different form of support, one that addresses his or her basic learning needs.

The rule of thumb is -
if your child is struggling to keep up in more than one subject, tutoring may not help-

2. Your child needs help with basic learning skills
Good tutors help children develop the strategies they need to be able to master a subject. For instance, a math tutor might help a child learn their multiplication tables, or how to understand written math problems; an English tutor might help a child to learn how to write an essay.

But what if the reason your child is struggling to learn is because he or she needs to develop some basic learning strategies, the learning strategies that underpin ALL learning?

If your child needs to develop basic learning strategies tutoring is not the best way to provide support for your child. You could end up paying for tutoring for many years, with limited results.

3. The way your child learns does not match the way the tutor teaches
This mismatch of teaching and learning style is a major reason why children find learning difficult. It is why your child can learn more from one teacher than from another. It is why your child will learn more from one tutor than another.

If you have decided that your child will benefit from having a tutor, the next thing you need to do is to make sure that the tutor teaches in a way that your child likes to learn. Otherwise you are spending money on a tutor who, at best, will not be making learning easy for your child, and at worst, may even be preventing your child from learning.

Before you waste money on tutoring be sure you know what help your child really needs.

Children need good physical abilities if they are to be good learners. Children who do not see well do not learn well, children who do not hear well do not learn well, children who are hungry do not learn well, children who are tired do not learn well. The need for a child to have these physical skills in order to be able to learn seems fairly obvious.

But not all physical abilities are so easy to see.

For instance, there is a report out today that shows that brains do not work well when they are starved of water. It seems that brains have problems making connections when they are dry and this lack of connectivity means less learning takes place, or that learning becomes more difficult.

So,if you want to make learning easier for your child make sure they get plenty to drink, and get them used to drinking water and juice rather than the sugary laden drinks that are on the market.

Who knew that helping children learn could be so easy?

OK, the time has come, to say something that I have avoided as long as I could. It is time to give parents the power they need to help their children learn.

Up to this point I have concentrated on giving parents ways that they can help children learn. But something happened a few days ago that made me angry, and made me understand, finally, that parents need more than advice on ways to help their child learn, they need to understand, and take, their power.

This is what happened. I was visiting friends and we started talking about how well their children were doing in school. One of them has a hearing problem and has been advised to wear hearing aids in class. This boy is eight years old and finds the hearing aids uncomfortable so he often takes them out and then forgets to put them back. When this happens he tends to talk in a loud voice.

At a recent parent/teacher conference the teacher told his mother that she should make sure that her child wore his hearing aids at all time because his ‘outside voice’ was a distraction to the other children in class. From what I understand the teacher was quite blunt and the mother was left feeling that she was a bad mother because she didn’t make sure he wore his hearing aids all the time.

I know that children who are loud in class can be problematic, and I can understand the teacher telling the mother that she felt that her child should be wearing his hearing aids all the time, but the way she spoke to the mother was unhelpful to say the least.

Putting aside the fact that the mother cannot be in class all the time to make sure the child is wearing his aids there is a deeper issue here.

First, I must tell you that this mother is an experienced teacher in her own right. She teaches in a high school and helps students who are struggling to ‘fit in’ the system get an education. So she knows the system inside out.

This mother, qualified and experienced as she is, was upset about what the teacher had said, and the way she had said it. But she never told the teacher about her feelings. All she could do was complain to friends and relatives about the meeting and they way she had been treated.

And this mother knew the system, she knew how the system worked and had no reason to feel intimidated by the teacher. I could only imagine how other parents must feel in situations like this.

I realized that it is no use just giving parents advice and support on ways they can help their child learn. I need to giver parents the power they need to become active participants in their child’s education.

I can do this … watch this space!

Many students fail to get the grades they are capable of getting because they don’t do the work they need to to get the marks they deserve. But this lack of work is the result, not the cause, of their problem.

We have all known students like this, and we have probably accused them of being lazy, or unorganized, or even of not caring about their work. And we were probably wrong!

The story goes something like this -

Johnny (sorry to all those called Johnny!) has a test coming up in a week.

He knows that he has to revise if he is going to get good marks, and he also knows that the work was pretty easy for him to do the first time round. So, he thinks that all he needs to do is to quickly look through his previous work, maybe reread a section or two from the text book, and all will be fine. After all, he did OK last time so everything will be fine this time.

The night before the test he looks over what he has to learn, does some reading, and feels ready to do well in the test the next day.

You know what happens next.

He does not do well. He complains that the test was too hard, or that he didn’t understand the questions, or he answers the questions in such a haphazard way that he gets low marks.

And he wonders what went wrong!

Let’s get one thing clear, Johnny is a bright boy, and the work he has been asked to do is well within his capabilities. He knows this, so when he fails the test he has no idea why. If this happens more than once he starts to think that he is stupid, that he really cannot learn, and that no matter how hard he tries he will never do well.

The problem is not that he does not do the work he thinks he should do, the problem is that he has no idea how much work he has to do to be sure that he knows what he is supposed to know. Johnny would do the work if he knew what he had to do.

Let’s replay the scene above, but this time Johnny understands the amount of effort he has to put in to get good marks on the test.

Johnny is not worried about the test because he knows that he found the work pretty easy to understand. He also knows that he needs to be sure that he has all the information at his fingertips so he sets up a revision plan. He starts thinking about this about a week before the test and he decides to review one small section of the work each night.

So far so good.

But Johnny takes it even further. Not only does he review the work, he sets himself a small test on each bit of work, just to be sure that he understands and remembers it. He realizes that some information he thought he knew he cannot remember well. He spends a bit of extra time reviewing that information.

How do you think Johnny did on the test this time?

You guessed it, he did quite well, and felt good about himself and the work he had done.

Same Johnny, different perceptions about the effort required to review the material in the test.

One of the basic learning skills you can help your child develop is the ability to understand the amount of effort they will have to put in to achieve something. It can be a hard lesson to learn.

In the next post I will give you some ideas about how you might do this. Trust me, it is worth the effort (ha!), and your child will be a much better learner as a result.

Research seems to be catching up with me! There is a study out of Michigan University that links better grades with the vision students have of themselves as adults.

Students who wanted to become doctors or lawyers, and students who wanted to become rock stars or sport heroes both intended to go to college but only one of the groups actually did the work required to get there.

What made the difference between the two groups? Why did one group do the work required to get to college while the other did not?

The group that wanted to become lawyers of doctors understood that they would have to work hard to get the skills they needed in those professions. The group that wanted to be rock stars and sports stars thought that it would just happen, that they would be ‘discovered’, and did not think that they had to work hard to get what they wanted.

The difference between the groups was that one understood the direct connection between effort today and success tomorrow. It was the understanding of what had to be done that made the difference. The research suggests that being annoyed with a student for getting poor grades is not the best way to help that student improve their study skills. It would be much more effective to help the student understand the relationship between the amount of effort required and the level of success he will achieve.

I believe that students fail because they lack one or more basic learning skills. I have a list of the basic learning skills that all students need if they are to become good learners. One of the basic learning skills I talk about is the ability to understand the amount of effort that a task will require. If a student cannot do this he or she will soon become unmotivated and will fail to complete the learning task.

If you want to help your child learn, help him or her understand how much effort they will have to spend doing things. If you play the lottery and expect to get everything you want with little effort, think about what your child is learning from you. Play the lottery by all means, but don’t count on winning to solve all your problems!

The BC Business Council highlighted the lack of school readiness as one of the major economic issues of our time. Virginia Green, the person I heard on the radio talking about this, said that when children are not ready to learn they miss out on their education and then find it difficult to get good jobs and contribute to the economy of the Province.

It makes sense. If teachers have to spend time helping children develop the basic skills they need to help them learn they are going to be spending less time on actually teaching them what they need to learn.

What I don’t altogether agree with is that the problem is caused mainly by parents not being able to spend time with their children because, in the present economy, both parents need to work full time to make ends meet. I know that finding time to spend with their children is a problem for some parents but I think that an even greater problem is that parents are not sure of their role in helping their children get ready to learn.

Too often parents try to help their children develop school-type learning rather than the basic readiness skills children need, readiness skills such as language, confidence, and curiosity.

Why do parents do this?

My research pointed to are several reasons:

1. Parents tend to value ’school learning’ over ‘home learning’
2. They do not understand the special role they play in helping children learn
3. They do not have the information they need to be able to help their children develop these skills.

So, although making sure that parents spend more time with their children does not necessarily mean that the same children will be ready to learn when they start school.

Parents need to know what to do in the time they have with their child, how to lead their child to learning (now you know where my business name came from!)

If you want to know more check out my articles, click on the blue Ezine logo on the left to access them.

The hockey playoffs have started and someone in our house (not me!) is glued to the TV whenever a game is broadcast. For those of you who don’t know, each game is made up of three periods of 20 minutes or so with two breaks of 15 minutes. I am really good at getting dinner on the table the moment that the sound goes for the end of a period. This is not as simple as it seems because of stoppages for penalties, goals, fights etc. The timing has to be carefully judged, it is important to get it right.

While clearing up last night (my husband cooks and clears on non hockey nights!), I started thinking about how important tit is to get the timing right when helping children learn. Children learn at their own pace but sometimes they need a nudge to hurry up and sometimes they need to be reminded to slow down and think about how they are learning. As a teacher I was pretty good at knowing how and when to do this. But parents do not have the experience of working with many children and understanding when a child needs to be nudged and when he needs to slow down.

This is unfortunate because it leads to two different situations, both of them hazardous to a child’s education.

Firstly, parents who try to ‘nudge’ too hard and too often – you know, the ones that get called ‘pushy parents’- may make learning so stressful for their child that he begins to hate having to learn and is so busy trying to please his parents that he never has time to think for himself. I know that parents only nudge kids in this way because the want the best for them, and many parents do not even know they are causing their child to dislike learning, but it is a problem.

Secondly, when parents do not realize that they need to nudge their child the child often misses out on getting the help he or she needs. I have worked with many parents who told me that they knew there was a problem with their child’s learning in Grade 1 but it wasn’t until the child was in Grade 4 that something was done about it. By then it is almost too late. The child has missed so much learning that it can be very difficult for him or her to catch up.

Timing is important.

Don’t try and speed up your child’s learning too much and end up putting them of learning for life

and

Do get help as soon as you suspect that your child needs help. You know your child better than anyone. Trust your instincts.

If your instincts tell you that something is wrong you can contact me to find out what you can do. Everyone gets 15 minutes free consultation.

How is your timing?

New research from the University of Nevada states that children growing up in homes with many books get 3 years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation, and class.

Just imagine, you can help your child get the equivalent of three years extra schooling- I would rather use the word ‘learning’ – by having books in your house, books that children can look at, learn to read and love and enjoy.

The report says that more books you have in the home the more your child is exposed to learning. And this result holds no matter what country or political system families live in.

Having books in your home is as great an advantage as having university educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.

This is an amazing finding.

If you want your child to get a good education – have books at home.

If you can’t afford to buy them go to the library, beg, borrow, share.

What a simple way to help your child succeed!

But wait a minute! Who buys the books? Who takes the kids to the library to borrow books? Who encourages children to read?

It is fine and dandy to state that having books in the home leads to more learning but perhaps a more important implication is that when children have parents who care enough about their education to make sure that there are plenty of books in the home children learn more.

It is not just the books that are helping children learn, it is the attitude of their parents!

For those who want to read the full report – it is a bit of a dry read -
it is available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Yesterday I heard the Chairperson of my local School Board talk about how upcoming financial cuts will change the services they offer. This is never good news, but something else she said almost was even more worrying.

Parents who are concerned about their child’s education and want to know what can be done to help their child learn are unable to get a learning assessment for their child without a long wait. Sometimes parents can wait years until their child reaches the top of the list for an educational assessment. By then it can be too late. Their child will have missed so many learning opportunities that it will be very hard for him or her to catch up.

Parents understand this and want to do something about it, so they have their child’s learning assessed privately. The schools here have to act on these assessments so may parents see this as a way of jumping the queue.

And who can blame them? Parents want the best for their child, and if the system cannot help them then they will try and get what they need privately.

But not all assessments are created equal. Before you get an assessment of your child’s learning you need to ask yourself what you want the assessment to do.

Do you want to use an assessment to try and get the school to provide extra services for your child? Then you must make sure that the person doing the assessing has qualifications that are recognized by the school system. And you should find out what type of learning issues are accepted as making a child in need of extra support. These are made very clear by school boards and are used as a means of allocating scare resources such as special education assistant or special school placement. If your child does not come into any of the categories that are recognized by the school board then he or she will automatically be ineligible for extra support and you will have wasted your money.

Do you want a learning assessment to find about your child’s level of achievement in relation to other children of the same age? You might think that your child is exceptionally bright or that he or she is not doing well in some subjects and you want to know how your child’s learning compares to that of other children. A learning assessment can tell you this. Most learning assessment results are based on some set of standardized testing. That means that the results are always presented in ways that compare what your child can do with what the vast majority of other children of the same age are expected to be able to do. There is a standard that your child is measured against.

I have two concerns about this type of assessment. Firstly, I am not sure what good it does to know what your child can do in comparison to others. How is this going to help you understand what support your child needs? Secondly, most of these reports are written in a style of language that is very difficult to understand. Even I, with some knowledge of the language of assessment , have difficulty understanding what the report is saying and i know that parents have even more difficulty. I have worked with several parents helping them understand the results of their child’s learning assessment and trying to translate the results into practical ways they can support their child’s learning.

Do you want a learning assessment to find out why your child is struggling to learn? Then you need to find an assessment that looks specifically at how your child learns rather than what they know or can do.

The results you will get from this type of assessment may not tell you how bright your child is in comparison to other children – but you now that already don’t you!- it will not give you the raw data that will tell a school system that your child needs special school support – but if your child needs this type of support you are probably already aware of the depth of his or her learning issues!

It will tell you why your child is having learning problems and it will tell you what you need to do to help your child overcome those problems. In short, it will give you back the power you need to help your child learn.

This type of assessment is hard to find. I know, I have been conducting these assessments for years.

If this is the kind of learning assessment you want for your child contact me. I have now got a full range of services that will help you discover why your child is struggling to learn and exactly what you can do to help. It has taken me a while to adapt my one-on-one assessment process into something that all parents can use. But it is ready now – check out my site for more information, and start giving your child the learning opportunities he or she needs to become an eager, happy learner once again.

I was talking to the husband of a ex-colleague of mine, asking about how his eldest son was doing, when he told me how frustrated he had been with the education system and how he felt that his son had been cheated out of the education he deserved.

Remember, I had worked with his wife, and I knew a little about how his son was struggling in school but I assumed that his mother, a teacher, was able to handle the system and get her son the support he needed.

Seems that it hadn’t happened that way.

Despite having a mother who is a well qualified and experienced teacher and a father who is willing to go to bat for his child, this boy still did not get the education he needed to become all that he could be.

This boy, let us call him John, had difficulties learning to read and to write. I suspect his language development was delayed for some reason. His visual and motor skills are excellent and, given a broken computer he can soon work out how fix it. However, his poor language development led to problems when it came to spelling and writing and as a result, he found it very difficult to pass tests and exams.

John is doing well. He has found a job where he can use his practical skills and his future looks bright.

What had caused his father to express his frustration with the school system was the news that, because of education spending cuts, parents of children with special educational needs were complaining that services to their children would be reduced. For some parents this meant that their child would get less time with an educational assistant, or getting speech therapy.

John’s father did not object to these children getting these extra services, but he wondered why his son did not get the special support that would have helped him with his learning problems. He wondered why being designated as in need of special educational support meant that a child could get the help he or she needed while his son, not thought of as being in need of special support was left to struggle in the classroom.

These were my answers, see if you agree with me;

1. The students who stand out in class for some particular reason, they are bright, or handicapped, or way behind their classmates, become eligible for the kind of assessment that gives them access to extra funding and extra support. Those children who are struggling in class may never get on this list and, therefore, never get close to getting the support they need,

2. If a student is good in one area of work- in John’s case fixing things- it is assumed that he or she has the ability to be good in other areas and that they will probably catch up given time.

3. Teachers are not trained to understand why students have learning problems. They are only aware of the children whose learning problems are so great that they cannot be ignored.

4. Teachers are expected to be able to teach all students in their class. If a child is struggling to learn they are expected to know what to do to help that child overcome their learning difficulty. But they don’t. See # 3 above.

5. Grey area students – those who are having learning difficulties – tend to blame them selves for their issues. They know that they are clever in some areas of learning and wonder why they struggle in others. They tend to keep quiet and to put up with what they are given in terms of teaching support. From the teacher’s perspective they are easy to ignore!

6. Parents don’t know how to express their concern about their child’s learning. I have come across this situation time and time again. A parent is worried about their child’s progress in school but, rather than go to the teacher to ask for information and advice, the parent tries to help with homework, or gets a tutor or buys some workbooks in an attempt to help their child become a better learner. This may work, but why not make sure that the teacher knows your child is having difficulties doing school work then he or she can do something about it?

7. Education systems cannot fund extra support for all students who need it. They just can’t, there is no way any school system has the money to cover every child’s learning needs.

8. Neither do school systems have the funds to train every teacher in how to recognize children with learning issues and to know how to help them overcome them.

John’s father felt that his son had been short changed by the school system, and I agreed with him.

But if a school system cannot give s child the support he or she needs parents must.

Otherwise we are failing a large percentage of student.

Before I start this blog post I want you to know that I was a teacher for over 35 years. I think that most teachers do a great job, often in difficult circumstances, and are committed to helping children learn. Good teachers always have this feeling that whatever they do they could always do more, that there is always more to do. This is true, there is always more to learn, more to teach, more to get right.

Good teachers are not born, they are made. They are made by the experiences they have in the classroom, by learning how to handle behavior problems, by knowing when to push a child and when to back off. There are many, many things that teachers need to know that they do not learn in College. I believe that over my 35 years as a teacher I gradually learned how to be a better teacher. I certainly felt that, at the end of my career, I could handle any learning issue that came my way.

But something else changed as I became a better teacher. I became humble. I understood that I was merely one person in a child’s learning life and probably not such an important person at that. This was quite hard to come to terms with. After all,I had spent over 6 years training how to teach and had honed my skill through years of experience in the classroom. I knew that most teachers saw themselves as the primary source of learning for the children in their class. They felt that what they were teaching was of utmost importance and usefulness and that this information was critical to a child’s future.

I am not saying that what children learn in schools is not important to their future because,obviously, it is. But I am saying that it is time to put classroom learning into perspective and to stop teachers, and school systems, from setting the learning agenda on their own.

Let me explain.

It is well known that parental involvement in a child’s education is one of the main indicators of success for a child. Teachers know this and they do their best to get parents involved in their child’s education. They hold meeting, conferences, send letters home etc. etc. All in an effort to involve parents in schooling.

Note that I wrote ’schooling’ rather than ‘education’.

I wrote ’schooling’ because the vast majority of the ways teachers try to get parents involved relates to what is happening in the child’s school. Teachers ask parents to ‘read to their child’, to help with homework,to volunteer on field trips etc. These are all excellent activities but they are all school related.

What teachers do not do, mainly because the do not know how to do it, is to tell parents exactly how they can use their role as parent to help their child learn. Parents have no need to even visit a school (although I strongly recommend that they do!) to get involved in their child’s learning. Parents can do a host of things at home, in the park, with friends, that contribute to their child’s education.

In fact, the only way a child can reach his learning potential is if parents support education, not just ’schooling’, but ‘education’ in its broadest sense.

We need parents to step up to the plate and to help children learn; we need parents to understand exactly how they influence their child’s learning; we need parents who are willing to take control of their child’s education.

When parents do this two things will happen. First, children will have more opportunities to learn, and second teachers can be left to do what they do best, to teach the curriculum to children who are ready to learn.

Your child’s education is far too important to be left to teachers. What are you going to do about it?

I am a teacher with two diplomas, a masters degree, and a Ph. D. and I am a backward learner!

There, I have said it.

It has taken me many years to accept and to understand that I learn backwards. I used to call myself a slow learner and I told people that it was because I was a slow learner that I was really good at teaching children with learning problems. I understood where they were coming from. But calling myself a slow learner never quite fitted. In fact I learn things pretty quickly- my Ph. D. supervisor even called me a ‘quick study’, much to my surprise- but somehow my learning never seemed to produce the results I needed and wanted.

Now, some of you are going to have problems with this post, but stick with me. Most people are forward learners not backward learners like me, and I know from vast experience that forward learners find it very difficult to understand how backward learners function.

It is also very difficult for backward learners to explain why they feel unhappy with the way they learn. But I will do my best.

Backwards learners tend to learn visually. They are good at creating a vision of where they want to be or of what the person is trying to teach them. This is a great skill and to be encouraged. But along with this skill often comes the inability to understand the steps of how you reached that vision. Now i know that forward learners cannot understand how you can have a vision and not know how you got there. But you will have to believe me, you can and backward learners do this all the time.

Let me give you an example. I want to write a book about helping your child succeed in school. I know how to begin and I know where i want to end. The difficulty I have is working out the steps to get from the beginning to the end in a logical fashion. I KNOW that there is a series of logical steps that link the beginning and the end of the book because otherwise how could I have reached a conclusion? But it takes me ages to work them out, and what is worse, they keep shifting!

Another example. I have taught some children who,literally could not read one day and could read the next day. Not for them the slow painful working out what a word said, they either got it or they didn’t. It was as though their brain did not function until it had all the answers it needed to be able to do something. When I asked them why they could suddenly read they had no idea what had happened to make then be able to read. They were backward learners.

Logically I know that their brain was taking in information all the time, but was not ready to use it until it felt it could produce an answer. I understand the feeling. I have to know what i want to say before I say it, I have to have an answer before I start on a discussion, I have to know the result before I do something. ( I always read the last pages of a book shortly after I have started it. I need to know the ending, only then can I really enjoy the book. It drives my husband mad!)

Backward thinkers are not given the respect they deserve!

In a world of forward thinkers the backward thinker can be seen as being indecisive, head in the clouds, unproductive. It can be very disheartening. If your child is a backward thinker he or she may be struggling in a class of forward thinkers, may be thinking that they cannot learn, or even that they are stupid and strange. If your child is a backward learner you need to respect their learning style and help them fill in the steps that got them to their conclusions and visions.

Here are some signs that your child might be a backward learner;
* Daydreams
* Knows what he wants to write but not how to write it
* May have flashes of brilliance
* Grades are lower than you- or he – expected
* Can be exasperating
* Is a strong visual learner
* May like to learn in a messy environment

There is nothing wrong with being a backward learner as long as you know that is how you function. Once a child understands why they are having difficulty learning or producing good work in class they can find ways to fit into the world of forward learners and get recognized for their skills.

If anyone is interested in knowing how to help backward learners let me know and I will post a blog about it.