Set Up Your Child for Success: Begins with the Elementary Grades

Being successful in school starts with being organized and focused at home. With a few basic guidelines, organizing can begin today. Does your student have a place where she can study without interruption? It can be fun to be in the middle of family activities by studying and completing homework, but it’s distracting.

When your student is doing homework, it’s not just about completing the assignment, it’s also about mastering the content being studied. It is about building knowledge about concepts and principles that are the framework for the course of study.

Even in the elementary grades, time alone to study helps reinforce good study habits. One idea I’ve used is to make good use of time by using flash cards to learn math tables and spelling words. You can get index cards and let them write their words on one side and the meaning on the other. These cards can be placed upright in a narrow shoebox or plastic container for easy reference. Flash cards can also be purchased for core subjects. My kids carried those flashcards with them and studied when they had even a few minutes in the car.

You can help them make their own flash cards about the facts they are studying by pasting on the picture of the animal, the country, or even a letter and letting the student design the back by writing the facts they need to learn. These can be studied in your alone time and then you can have a fun time going through them together. Learning is not just a chore, it’s fun, if you present it that way. Making the cards helps the student to organize their thoughts and facts at the same time.

Learning to organize study time is essential in those early years. Take a sheet of paper and make a list of what needs to be done and how long it should take. As a task is completed, let the student check it off the list. This gives instant recognition and a sense of success. It is important that they themselves calculate this schedule. As a parent, it’s tempting to help and micromanage children, and this does not foster self-sufficiency and a sense of being able to accomplish tasks on their own.

It doesn’t have to be a complicated system, you can just make boxes that your child can label with homework and cross it off when done. A simple kitchen timer that doesn’t make an annoying noise works best for this.

Design a study space that contains writing space and a place to store all the supplies needed to complete school work. It’s important to keep this space organized and tidy, even if the rest of the room isn’t neat and tidy. The desk and the area around it can be the starting point for beginning to be an organized student.