Back to School from Holiday Break: How to Help Your Kids Focus

We all love the holidays and as students and teachers we appreciate having some time away from school and work. You as parents may have even used it as a time to take family vacations or just to take some time out to be at home with your kids however between Thanksgiving and New Year's something more than just time away from work and school occurs. During this time students experience learning loss and can lose up to a month of schooling forgetting a third of what they learned during the fall semester. If you were unable to participate in some of the education activities that we posted to work on with your kids over the holiday then you may have to help your child get focused before returning to school this week. So we wanted to provide you with some ways in which you can help your child focus.

The first thing you want to do is make sure you provide them with a healthy breakfast every morning or make sure that they get a healthy breakfast at school. This provides them with fuel for the day allowing them to focus on classwork.

Provide them with structure: Make sure that they have a bedtime, a time in which they have to wake up, and a homework time and location.

Allow them to have an outlet if this means sports, a job (for older students), art, whatever they need that provides them with a way to get away from school work and home life.

Limit Distractions this includes television, toys, and video games (we will discuss this more a little later). Some parents only allow children the option to watch TV and play video games on the weekend so that their children can be focused on school and school only during the week.

Sometimes as children work on homework it can become overwhelming and they need a break so if they seem to become overly distracted it is alright to give them a short break. 

Be an active parent and take some time to talk to your children. These conversations do not have to always be about school or school work just find out what is going on in their lives.

Make sure you are monitoring homework. We recommend providing all students with an agenda or calendar in which to write down homework assignments. Some school systems use grade monitoring systems (if yours has one sign up for it immediately) these systems allow you as a parent to see all assignments, attendance, and grades as well as set up triggers for grades and attendance.

Make sure you limit television and video games especially during the week. Studies show that by the end of elementary school, the average child has witnessed 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of violence on TV. Studies have found that children who watch more TV are likely to be aggressive, especially immediately after watching violent programs. 

Finally I cannot express this enough Please, Please, Please Encourage Reading. The more your child reads the more fluent they become and the more they comprehend. As they increase comprehension and fluency their grades will not only increase in Reading but it will also increase their grades in their other classes.

Get Focused!!!!!!

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