Some children find learning easier than others. However with the help of parents, children who struggle and are different types of learners can accomplish their full learning potential. When parents are taught to understand their child’s learning style and then given the tools to support them, they can become their child’s best advocate.

Leading to Learning was created by Dr. Patricia Porter to provide parents with information and strategies so they can make good, educated choices about ways to help their children learn. In essence, support their children to become all that they can be.

How Can You As a Parent of a Struggling Student Help?

Leading to Learning is a parent directed * kit* that assesses your child’s learning style and pinpoints the source of their learning difficulties. Once you complete the questionnaire and return it to Dr. Porter, she evaluates your answers. She then arms you, with the best-suited strategies to support your child’s learning style.  These strategies are directed at your child’s specific learning skill strengths.

Dr Porter’s recommendations are structured in four ways:

* Homework  – strategies parents can use

* Schooling  – how to work with your child’s school

* Tutoring- how to get the best tutor for your child (if needed)

* Resources- what type of resources work best for your child

When your child learns from their strengths, rather than weaknesses, the improvement in self-esteem skyrockets. The result is a positive outlook for both your child and you the parent.

“Children are capable of becoming happy, eager students once they receive the right type of support”

I hate rules, but sometimes they are necessary.  Here are ten tips that will help you set useful, manageable rules for your child’s behavior – and keep to them!

1  Discuss the need for rules with your child.

Even young children can accept that rules are necessary if they have them explained to them in language they can understand.  Make sure that your child knows that the rule is there for a purpose, a purpose that makes sense to him, not just to you.

2.  Start with ONE rule.

Decide on the one rule that you are going to start with, and keep to it.  What bugs you most?  Start by making a rule around that.

3.  Always discuss rule setting with your child.

Ask your child’s opinion on whether the new rule is fair or not. And be prepared to discuss the replies and to adapt the rule as necessary.

The only fixed rule I had in my class was that no child was allowed to stop another child working.  If that happened there was never any discussion, the child had to leave the classroom. I made sure that every child knew this rule and that I would enforce it without fear or favour.  You will need to set up a few rules – mainly for safety – for which there is no discussion.

4.  Discuss the consequences of rule breaking.

What would you expect to happen? What would your child expect to happen?  You might find that your child is harder on himself than you would be, this happens when children are involved in rule making and start to understand how rules work.  Come to a suitable compromise.

5.  Be consistent.

If you do not consistently enforce a rule what is the point of having it?  that brings us to…

6. Have as few rules as possible.

Start with one and gradually work up to no more than ten!  You can’t keep that many in place consistently, neither can your child.

7.  Rules can change – if you all agree.

Be prepared to change rules as situations change.  Get rid of out -of -date rules that have lost their purpose and add new ones, but add them carefully and as a substitute for an old rule rather than just an addition to the list.

8. Put them up where everyone can see them.

Write down the rules, with consequences, and put them somewhere everyone can see them.  After all, everyone has to abide by them, you too!  Better still, get your child to write them up and pin them on the wall.

9.  Be prepared to live by the rules.

I let children set rules for me.  We discuss them first and I am allowed to complain about rules that would be impossible for me to keep (cell phones in class).  These get written up with the other rules and consequences discussed.  I am expected to live by them.  Lapses are discussed, apologies given, suitable action taken, just as they would be if your child had broken a rule.

This gives you an insight into how hard it can be to keep to some rules.

10.  DON’T GIVE UP.

It can take some time for this system to start working, especially if your child is used to you being inconsistent.  Using these tips may come as a shock to you both. It will take time. effort and probably tears ( your as well as your child’s).  But your child is worth it, your relationship with your child is worth it.

You have a child with special problems such as ADD or ADHD?

Then consistency is even more important. A few rules ( a very few) around safety may not be open for discussion and that is fine.  But your child will only learn to trust those rules if he or she knows that they are there for a reason. This will happen when he has had the experience of setting rules and trying to live by them.

Take care, let me know how you get on.

Kate was trying hard to learn,but the odds were stacked against her. Fortunately she found a saviour.  Here is her story.

Kate is a bright girl but a slow learner.  She read slowly and with little comprehensions. Her reading proficiency scores showed that she read at 50 words per minute and had a comprehension level of 30%.  This inability to read with fluency and to understand what she was reading was effecting her ability to learn.

Then Kate had a learning style assessment and it was discovered that she had a very visual style of learning.  She liked to learn by understanding patterns, using colors, seeing ‘pictures’.

So, Kate was shown how to use visual strategies to help her read with more fluency and comprehension.

To see if the strategies worked Kate’s reading proficiency was retested.  She was given a much more complex piece of reading and was timed on her reading speed and her comprehension.

The results were dramatic.  Her average reading speed jumped up from 50 words a minute to over 500 words per minute!

Her comprehension went from 30% to 85% on the first test and to 100% on a subsequent test!

The Deputy Headmaster ( it was an English study) said that if Kate had not been shown how to use her visual leaning skills to help her learn she would have struggled throughout her school life.

Most teachers have a verbal style of teaching.  They teach by explaining, writing on the board, writing instructions on worksheets, , talking, and using text books.   This is fine fora child who is ‘Word Smart’ and learns best when information is presented this way.  But about 40% of children are visual learners, they are ‘Picture Smart’. They need information presented in graphic form such as, diagrams, patterns, pictures, maps, doodles.

These students struggle to understand information presented verbally and should be taught strategies to help them translate how they are being taught into how they learn.  Once they have developed these strategies, and learned how to use them,  their ability to learn rapidly increases.

Research studies have proved time and time again that children with an understanding of  how they learn and who have developed strategies to  use their learning skills  will become better learners.

When this happens the results looks like magic, and  feels like magic.

That is why I tell the students I work with that I am a magician.  I can show you how to be a magician too!

Schools are failing children because they only reward and recognize students who learn the way they teach.  So says Sir Ken Robinson, and I agree with him.

He tells the story of a mother who was told that her daughter was having trouble in class.  She could not sit still and was struggling to learn.  The teacher suggested that the mother take her to her doctor to get some medication that would help her focus more.

The mother took some time explaining to the doctor why her child needed some medication.  She told him all the things the teachers had said and that it was the teachers who had suggested that the girl needed medication.

During this lengthy chat the young girl, trying hard to be good,  sat on her hands in an effort to stay still.

After hearing what the mother had to say the Doctor said that he needed to talk to the mother alone, and asked the girl to wait for a few minutes until they came back.  As he left with the mother he switched on the radio that was on his desk.

When they were both out of the room he told the mother to look through the window in the door to see what her child was doing.  She was dancing to the music!

He then said that her daughter did not need medication, she needed to go to dance class!

When the mother took her to dance class the girl said that, for the first time, she had met other children who were like her. children who needed to dance.

This girl went on to start her own dance school, create the choreography for Broadway musicals, and earn millions of dollars.

Would this have happened if she had been medicated as the teachers suggested?  I doubt it.

It may not be your child that is failing to learn, it may be the school that is failing to teach your child in the way he learns.

Students who are different learners often appear to have a learning disability.  But there is an enormous difference between the two and parents need to understand this.

Parents often think that their child has a learning disability when the issue is that their child is a different learner and needs a different teaching approach

A few days ago I got a call from a mother who is worried about her son’s ability to learn.  Her concerns started when he moved into Grade 4.  She told me that her son is very bright and that he used to get straight ‘A’s’ but that his grades had started to go down, and he was having problems studying.

What could they do?  The parents were afraid that their son had a learning disability.  They wanted to know how they could help him learn.

The family gave me two enormous clues that helped me determine that this boy did not have a learning disability.

Firstly, his troubles only started when he went to Grade 4.  If he had a genuine learning disability they would have been apparent much earlier.

Secondly, he had been getting ‘A’s’ and it seemed that his grades were dropping because he was not studying.

These are signs of a ‘different learner’ rather than a learner with a disability.

It was a brief call, but here is my read on he situation.

Many children start to have learning problems when they go into Grade 4 as a result of changes in the way they are taught.  In Grades 1 – 3 teachers use very visual ways of teaching.   Children may have limited language ability at this age and the teacher understands this and compensates by using visual ways of getting the message across.

Then, in Grade 4, everything changes.  Teachers assume that children have developed the language skills they need and they use a much more verbal teaching style.

Most children can accommodate this change in teaching style, for some ( about 25% is my guess) it creates real learning difficulties.  These students may, or may not, have developed the language skills they need but they cling onto their preference to learn visually.

This is when bright students start to create wonderful  strategies to either avoid working or to find ways to make the teaching make sense.  I am always amazed at how hard some of these students actually work and how little progress they end up making.

Then, two things start to happen.

1.  Because learning is so hard the student stops trying so hard, grades drop, and

2.  The student starts to think he or she is stupid and cannot learn, so stops trying to learn.

The situation becomes a downward spiral.

The ONLY way to stop the student spiraling downward, and the parents becoming upset and frustrated, is to find out how the student likes to learn (preferred learning style)  and show the parents, and  student, how to adapt the teaching situation to meet their learning needs.

And the irony is that it is easy to do, prevents a lot of anxiety and frustration, and best of all, helps the student become the kind of learner that he is capable of becoming.

It is a guaranteed process, it works every time!!  What else can you say that about?

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.

If you think that your child has a learning problem you are probably right. Don’t be put off by teachers telling you not to worry, get your child the help he needs before it is too late. Trust your instincts, your child needs your help.

Recently a mother told me that she was worried because her ten year-old son still couldn’t read well. She told me that she had been worried about his lack of reading ability for some time. She had done the right thing, she had told her son’s teachers about her concerns and had even asked for her son’s reading skills to be assessed by a specialist.

The teachers had told her not to worry, that her son did not need an assessment and that many children do not start to read until they are ten or even older. This information did not make her feel any better!

Let’s look at what the teachers were saying.

Yes, many children who become excellent readers do not start reading as soon as everyone would like. Some children who end up being very good readers do not start to read until they are seven or eight years old. But these are the exception rather than the rule.

If a child who is ten years old has reading problems it is time to find out why.

I don’t know the whole story, maybe this boy is doing well in school and is just having problems reading. It is difficult to imagine as so much of schoolwork depends on a child’s ability to read.

Maybe this boy is having difficulty learning anything and his reading problems are only one of many learning issues that he has. I hope not, but this can often be the case.

Maybe this mother is overanxious, overprotective and overbearing. But I don’t think so. Any mother would be worried about a ten year old who was not reading, and from what she told me she seems more scared of the teachers than they are of her.

So what can this mother do?

Should she believe what the teachers tell her and wait for her son to ‘blossom’? Or should she fight as hard as she can to get her son the help that he needs?

I have worked with many children whose parents told me that they knew something was wrong with their child’s learning years before their child got any extra learning support. I trust parents’ instincts.

You know if your child is struggling to learn, your instincts tell you that something is not right. Don’t wait until it is too late to get the help your child needs.

Start fighting for your child, he needs your support now.

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!

Have you ever thought that your child was lazy, not interested in working, unmotivated? Many parents have. So they tell their child to work harder, they complain about the poor grades they are getting, maybe insist that their child does more homework.

But it doesn’t help. Their child does not do more work, remains unmotivated, and resents what you are making them do.

The problem is that you are trying to fix the symptom, not the cause, of their learning difficulty.

The cause of your child’s learning problem might be that he or she does not understand the amount of effort they have to put into learning something. The symptoms, or signs, of their lack of understanding may be any or all of the following;

1. Leaves work until the last minute and then panics at what he has to do.
If a child has no understanding of the amount of time and effort it will take to do something there is no way he can schedule in the work that has to be done. Most children (and many adults!) underestimate the time and effort they need to spend doing something. As a result they don’t do the work until they feel that they have to, usually the night before a big project is due. When they start doing the work they suddenly realize that it is going to take much longer than they thought. Then they start to panic. They have no idea how they will finish the work on time and either get you to do it for them, work through the night (not recommended) or quickly throw together some work that is really bad and does not reflect their abilities.

Have you ever been there, and had to handle a child who is panicking about getting work finished on time? Telling your child that he or she should have thought of this earlier is not the solution. Your child did not know he should have thought about it earlier, he had no idea how long the work would take. It isn’t a scheduling issues it is an issue of lack of understanding the effort that would be required to do the work.

2. Seems uninterested and unmotivated to do work.

Homework is finished in record time, or there is no homework because your child says he has done all the work in class, finished work is untidy and hastily done? These are all signs that your child has no idea that he has to put more effort into doing his work. The cause of your child’s learning problem is not lack of motivation, or lack of interest. These are the symptoms of a learning difficulty, the cause is that your child lacks a basic understanding of the amount of effort he has to use to do the work. (Lack of motivation and lack of interest can be caused by lack of other basic learning skills too).

3. Does poorly on tests or in exams.
Your child does the work, thinks he knows what he needs to know, and goes off to take the test or exam full of confidence that he will do well. After the exam he is a little concerned that he might not have dome as well as he expected to do. When he gets the results he finds that he has not done well at all. He is upset because he doesn’t know why. You are upset too because you know that your child is bright and seemed to prepare for the exam.

Your child did the work he thought was necessary to prepare for the exam. The problem was that he did not know what work he had to do, he underestimated the amount of effort he had to spend getting ready for the exam.

Doing badly on tests and exams is a symptom of lack of understanding of hoe effort leads to success.

4. Doesn’t know why their marks are so low.
This is almost the same as #3 above, but this time it refers to regular classwork. Your child does not understand the amount of effort he has to put into doing his work.

I understand that students cannot put all their effort into all their work all the time. They need to understand what work requires all their effort and what work they can do quickly. I have seen students labor over work that was unimportant, not giving themselves time to do important work well.

5. Starts to lose confidence in their ability to learn
Just imagine, yo think that yo have done everything you need to do to get something right, and then you find out that the results are now what you expected, in fact, they are much worse than you expected. You start to doubt your ability to do what is needed.

This happens with children all the time when they do not understand the amount of effort they need to expend on doing work. They THINK they are working hard, and they probably are working hard, but they are not working hard enough, or hard enough at doing the right thing, to make a difference to the final result.

If this happens over and over again the child is going to think that no matter what he does he is never going to be able to get things right. Therefore he must be unable to learn, he must be stupid. When children start to think this they stop trying to learn and this compounds the learning problems they have.

To help children overcome learning hurdles you need to find the CAUSE of the problem and treat that. Only treating the SYMPTOM leads to frustration and confusion.

The five signs above could all have a different cause. But more of that later.

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