Spring is a great time for fresh beginnings. Flowers are blooming and the chilly weather will soon be behind us. As the school year progressed, many students developed habits that may not be serving them well. Spring is a wonderful time to reset these habits and help your child boost their academic performance. Try some of these strategies with your child to improve their study skills, organization, reading, and writing skills this spring.

Study skills strategies

Your child may have started the year off with well-organized materials and intact study skills strategies. Yet as the school year progressed, these habits may have faded. They may now be completing their homework at random and inconsistent times, studying at different spots in your home, turning in assignments late, or losing their belongings. Help your child kick-start spring with these refreshed study habits:

Set a consistent homework time

Your child may come home and decide to have a snack, which then leads to TV time, a few video games, and another snack – and they don’t start their homework until well into the evening. Other days they might do their work right when they get home from school or just before dinner. For many students, this inconsistency can create chaos and can negatively affect their grades. Spring is a great time to help your child recreate a consistent homework time. Talk to them about the time they feel is best for completing their homework. Some students prefer doing their homework right after school, when they are still in “school mode.” Others prefer a snack or physical activity break before completing their work, and some prefer doing schoolwork in the early evening. Any of these options can work; the key is picking a consistent time and sticking with it. If there are days when your child has an after-school activity, come up with a plan for the time they will complete their homework on those specific days. Having a consistent homework time can help your child increase their focus, improve their productivity, and reduce parent-child homework battles that might otherwise ensue.

Set up a dedicated study space

As the school year has progressed, your child may have moved their homework spot all around your home, completing their work in different places just about every night. Take advantage of spring to help your child recreate a consistent study space. This space should ideally be a desk in their bedroom, but a spot on your kitchen or table or another room can work too. The key is having them complete their homework at this same spot on a regular basis. Also make sure they have all of the supplies they need for completing their school work at this spot – pens, pencils, scissors, highlighters, etc. If the supplies run low, fill them up to make sure your child doesn’t wander around during homework time looking for supplies they need, losing focus on their work. If your child works at a spot in another room, help them create a portable supplies bucket containing all of the supplies they need to complete their homework that they should carry with them to and from their room during homework time.

Create a reading routine

With phones, televisions, video games, apps, and so many options for entertainment, reading often falls by the wayside. Yet reading regularly is critical for success in school, as reading affects essentially all academic subjects. This spring, help your child get back into reading by creating a daily 20-minute reading routine. For young children, this ritual might take place right before bed, where you read to your child and discuss the events in the book. As children get older, you can alternate reading – you read a page, then they read a page, and discuss the book as you read to help your child develop active reading and comprehension skills. Talk about the characters, setting, and plot, and ask them prediction and inference questions. Later, when children are independent readers, have them read on their own for 20 minutes and then ask them to tell you about the book. You can even have them write a chapter summary at the end of each chapter in a notebook and create character maps describing each character in the book. The more children read, the more their fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary skills will improve.

Daily writing work

Spring is a great time to encourage your child to practice daily writing – something they should ideally continue into the summer months to further develop this skill. Have them start a journal and write a daily journal entry about something that happened to them that day. If daily is too frequent, even 2-3 times per week would work. You can also have them peruse newspapers or online news sources and have find articles that interest them – then write a summary about the article, or write a written response on whether they agree or disagree with it and why. Alternatively, you can have them pick any topic that interests them – rainbows, tornados, dogs – anything works, and each week write one paragraph per day (or as many days as possible) about that topic. Later, you can encourage them to self-check their writing using a checklist like COPS, which stands for Capitalization, Organization, Punctuation, and Spelling. The more they practice writing, the better.

Spring is a great time for renewal, and there’s still time in the school year for your child to improve their academic skills. Try these strategies with your child to help them end the school year on a confident and positive note.

EBL Coaching specializes in one-on-one in person and virtual tutoring for students in grades pre-K-12 with specialized learning needs. They use research-based, multi-sensory techniques, including the Orton Gillingham method, to develop students’ reading, writing, math, note taking, test taking, and executive functioning skills. Each student is evaluated and then receives an individualized learning plan to address their specific academic needs. Learn more at http://www.eblcoaching.com/.

Dr. Emily Levy, Founder & Director, is happy to hear from anyone who is in need for their child. You may reach her thru her website, and mention you heard of her thru MotherhoodLater.

The post How Spring Is a Great Time to Reset Academic Habits appeared first on EBL Coaching.