Helping Your Child Succeed in Math

There are plenty of things you can do to encourage your child's math progress:

• Visit your child's school. Meet with your child's teacher to see if your child is actively involved in math. Find out how you can help your child to better understand math problems.
• Set high standards for your child in math. Make sure your child is mathematically challenged and encourage his or her interest and pursuit of math. By the end of the 10th grade, your child should be expected to have studied algebra and geometry.
• Help children see that math is very much a part of everyday life. From statistics in sports to the sale price of clothing, from the calories in food to the amount of gas needed to travel from one city to another, math is important to us every day. Help your child make these connections to math.
• Point out that many jobs require math. From the scientist to the doctor, from the plant manager to the newspaper salesman, from the computer programmer to the hardware store owner, many jobs require a strong foundation in math. Help your child see that math leads to many exciting career opportunities.
• Stimulate your child's interest in technology. Encourage your child to use calculators and computers to further learning.
• Play games that help children develop decisionmaking and mental math skills. There are many games sold commercially, such as board games, that involve patterns and probability. Play games from your own family traditions such as counting games and games that keep score. Try schoolyard games such as jump rope, hopscotch, and jacks. Games require children to use strategies to make decisions, solve problems, and develop an understanding about numbers and how to use them (number sense) and computational skills.
• Positive attitudes about math will reinforce encouragement. Your feelings will have an impact on how your children think about math and themselves as mathematicians. Positive attitudes about math are important in encouraging your child to think mathematically.

Reading Skills are Critical

Helping your child learn to read is one of the best investments you can make in his or her education. Nothing else will have as great an impact on future learning. A child who can read can learn and study independently, while one who struggles to read and comprehend will struggle in every subject. School success begins with acquisition of reading.

Learning to read is hard work, though, and it doesn’t come easily. In order for a child to develop as a reader, he or she will need to practice several skills:Becoming a reader involves the development of important skills, including learning to:

• Listen and discuss stories read aloud
• Identify letters and letter patterns
• Connect written and oral language to decode words
• Read often, until decoding is an automatic process
• Expand vocabulary
• Use new words in conversation
• Understand what has been read

Parents play a vital role in reading development. You can help your child practice his or her reading skills at home, on the road, in stores, and anywhere you are. Here are some easy things you can do:

• Help them learn the alphabet. Name the letters and have your child identify them. Recite the alphabet in the car. Letter recognition starts the process.
• Practice sounds. Sing songs, recite poems, and create your own. When you read signs, point to the word and to individual syllables, so your child can see the patterns and how sounds are spelled. Help your child learn the sounds of language.
• Point out the words that are all around us, and how they help you. Read road signs, cereal boxes, labels, toy instructions, etc. aloud to your child. Demonstrate that reading skills are critical.
• Read aloud to your child.
• Listen to your child read. Resist the urge to correct everything, but be read to help when he or she falters.
• Read on your own. Children who see their parents reading for pleasure are more likely to read for pleasure themselves.
• Turn off the television, computer and cell phones while you are reading with your child. Eliminate distractions.
• Discuss what you are reading, even things you read on your own. This reinforces the idea that reading provides information and entertainment.
• Subscribe to a newspaper. You would be amazed at how much your child will absorb from it.
• Visit the library regularly. Let your child choose his or her own books.

Use That Agenda!

Organization is one of the biggest challenges a middle school student faces. Your child suddenly has to remember where to be, what materials to bring, what work needs to be done and when it is due- with a lot less direct support than he or she is accustomed to. To help students stay organized, many schools issue an agenda at the start of the school year. If your school doesn’t, you should definitely buy a date book for your child to record assignments.

Encourage your child to use his or her agenda every time. Writing things down is a habit, but it’s a very useful one and this is a great time to practice it.

An agenda is also a great tool for parents. It will help you keep your child organized and on task, it can provide an outline to discuss what happened in school each day and it can help you monitor your child’s budding independence. Here are some ways you can use it:

• In the morning
  
  Have the agenda open at the breakfast table. Have your child find each assignment and verify that it is in the proper folder in his or her backpack. Have him or her write down materials or books that need to be brought home that evening in order to study for upcoming tests or work on projects. Make sure the agenda is stowed in his or her backpack after breakfast.
  
  
• In the evening
  
  Have the agenda open at the dinner table. Go over the day, class by class. What did you do in class? What was assigned? When is it due? If it is a project, break things down into sub-tasks and figure out due dates for each task. Have your child record the dates in his or her agenda. Ask about upcoming tests and plan when study times will occur. It is much easier to get your child to agree to sign of IM for an hour to study if he or she has known it was coming for several days.
  
  If an assignment isn’t written down, or is too sketchy to be useful, make your child track down the information. Call a friend, look online, call the teacher if necessary, but push try to find the assignment and get it done. He or she will quickly learn that life will be easier if the agenda is current.
  
  

Getting middle school students to talk about their day can be like pulling teeth, a lot of grunts and groans and painful for everyone. I have found that an agenda is a great vehicle to get conversations going. It is much harder to be evasive to a specific “What does this essay need to be about?” than it is for “What did you do in school today?” The more information you have, the more specific your questions will be and the more complete the answers you receive will be.

Don’t expect your child to like this at first. We all get uncomfortable when someone starts poking around in our clutter. But we also like it when that clutter starts disappearing and we can take pride in being organized. Be patient but be relentless and you will see the rewards very quickly.

Spend Time Together

Want to know the single, biggest thing you can do to help your children achieve in school?

Spend time with them.

That's it. Just be with them. Proximity promotes conversation, and if you and your child are in the same room, sooner or later you will start talking. Get him or her talking and you will start to hear what they like and dislike about school, and then you can go to work.

It isn't hard; you just have to try.