Top 5 Tips to Staying on Top of Your Work at TechBoston
5. Keep your binder and bookbag organized. Check both your binder and bookbag EVERY DAY to put away loose papers, check notes, and make sure you completed all of your homework.
4. Check your teacher's web sites daily. We all post homework, classwork, and often put up extra credit opportunities. Check from a home computer, smart phone, or library computer. No excuses!
3. Come to school prepared every day. Always have several pencils, your binder, all of your notebooks, and your homework!
2. Study... daily! Studying the day before a test is never enough. You should be learning new things EVERY DAY! That means you need to study EVERY DAY! Go home each afternoon and review your notes, assignments, and homework to make sure that you understand every piece that you were expected to learn. If you don't keep at it for at least 30 minutes. If you still don't, turn to another adult, another student from your class, or email your teacher or ask the teacher for help during C block/lunch/office hours.
1. Write down all homework in your homework tracker and then do all of your homework every night. If you do all of your homework every night, then I guarantee you will never get lower than a C and almost certainly will get A's and B's.
PS Yes, that is President Obama in Mr. Louis' classroom at TechBoston Academy. The woman to the left of President Obama in the grey suit is Ms. Skipper, our headmaster, and the woman to the right of President Obama is Melinda Gates, the Co-Director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
4. Check your teacher's web sites daily. We all post homework, classwork, and often put up extra credit opportunities. Check from a home computer, smart phone, or library computer. No excuses!
3. Come to school prepared every day. Always have several pencils, your binder, all of your notebooks, and your homework!
2. Study... daily! Studying the day before a test is never enough. You should be learning new things EVERY DAY! That means you need to study EVERY DAY! Go home each afternoon and review your notes, assignments, and homework to make sure that you understand every piece that you were expected to learn. If you don't keep at it for at least 30 minutes. If you still don't, turn to another adult, another student from your class, or email your teacher or ask the teacher for help during C block/lunch/office hours.
1. Write down all homework in your homework tracker and then do all of your homework every night. If you do all of your homework every night, then I guarantee you will never get lower than a C and almost certainly will get A's and B's.
PS Yes, that is President Obama in Mr. Louis' classroom at TechBoston Academy. The woman to the left of President Obama in the grey suit is Ms. Skipper, our headmaster, and the woman to the right of President Obama is Melinda Gates, the Co-Director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Resources for Improving Your Study Skills:
- Quizlet.com = An online tool for making flashcards and quizzing yourself on the flash cards that you made - or that others have created on the site.
- Learn how to type faster using Dance Mat Typing from the BBC.
- Read the news. By reading the news, you are building reading skills, improving your background knowledge, and learning more about your world! Here are some of my favorite news websites: NPR, NYtimes.com, Google News, Google Science News, Scientific American, and Science News for Kids.
- Vocab Word of the Day.
- *** Note: The Cool Math web site... mmmm not a great study tool!
Do you know of other great study sites? Email them to me!
How to help your child at home...
*** Many of the tips below are from GreatSchools.org.
1. Provide a good place to study.
2. Help your child stay organized.
3. Make sure that your child is using their homework tracker!
"Did you do your homework?" Parents need to ask more questions than this one, teachers advise. How much should you help with homework? Monitor homework but remember it's your child's homework, not yours. You can help by asking questions that help guide your child to his own solutions. Some examples:
4. Encourage your child to estimate how long each assignment will take before they start their homework. By estimating how long they think an assignment will take, students begin to develop time management skills that are crucial for success in high school, college, and on the job.
5. Help your child to break up longer assignments, projects, and studying tasks into small chunks. You can sit down with your child and create a study schedule with them. Make sure that they do most of the work creating the study schedule! Sometimes, all you have do is sit their and ask them questions. You'll be surprised to find that your student will create the schedule largely by themselves, simply because you are sitting with them and encouraging them!
6. Study! Study! Study! Learning is hard work and requires a great deal of studying. Here are some studying tips:
7. Stay in touch with teachers. Teachers at TechBoston Academy are especially accessible by email. Don't hesitate to contact us with questions, concerns, or just in search of an update. Otherwise, we send home progress reports half-way through a marking period and report cards at the end of the marking period. You can also find homework assignments on teacher web sites and grades posted through Boston's new ASPEN system.
8. SLEEP! The American Pediatrics Association recommends that children who are 11-12 years old get 10-11 hours of sleep each night. That means that if your son or daughter is waking up at 6 AM for school, then they should be going to bed at around 8:00 PM in order to get 10 hours of sleep. Wow! That sounds incredibly early doesn't it? Unfortunately, TechBoston starts school early in part due to avoid difficulty with the buses and in part to facilitate access to sports and after-school activities. While I understand that it will be difficult to get any 11 or 12 year old to bed by 8:00 PM, please keep this in mind if your child is going to sleep around 9:00 PM, 10:00 PM or later. Getting adequate sleep plays a huge role in student success! PS It doesn't count as sleep if the student is in their bedroom but playing video games, texting, or on the computer! :-)
9. Remember, you're the boss! Establish rewards systems for your child when they meet goals and consequences when they don't do required work. Great rewards include going to the park together on the weekend, staying up late together on a Friday, or getting to have a sleep-over or get-together with friends. Consequences can include loss of computer privileges, loss of cell phone, or no tv. Don't forget to spell out what your child has to do to earn these privileges back!
1. Provide a good place to study.
- Make sure essential supplies such as pens, paper, dictionaries, and calculator are close by.
- Have good lighting and a sturdy chair that's the right height available.
- Eliminate distractions like video games, tv, and cell phones.
2. Help your child stay organized.
- Go through your child's book bag with them several times per week.
- Help your child develop a system to organize their papers. (Science papers go in the science folder, math papers in the math folder, homework always goes in the homework folder...)
3. Make sure that your child is using their homework tracker!
- The homework tracker should be filled out in class EVERY day for EVERY class.
- Check to make sure that each piece of homework has been completed.
- Sign every day that you have seen the homework tracker and the completed homework
- Homework is an important part of the learning process! Homework is an opportunity to practice skills learned in class, and teachers will not send home homework that is exceedingly difficult. Homework should always be attempted. If the homework is difficult for your child, then they should be spending MORE time on the homework and showing MORE work on the homework, not less or even worse bringing in a blank paper and reporting, "I didn't get it."
- Homework is an important part of your child's grade and will help prepare your child for the next day's learning tasks and future tests, quizzes, and projects.
"Did you do your homework?" Parents need to ask more questions than this one, teachers advise. How much should you help with homework? Monitor homework but remember it's your child's homework, not yours. You can help by asking questions that help guide your child to his own solutions. Some examples:
- What information do you need to do this assignment?
- Where are you going to look for it?
- Where do you think you should begin?
- What do you need to do next?
- Can you describe how you're going to solve this problem?
- How did you solve this problem?
- What did you try that didn't work?
- Why does this answer seem right to you?
- Tell me more about this part?
4. Encourage your child to estimate how long each assignment will take before they start their homework. By estimating how long they think an assignment will take, students begin to develop time management skills that are crucial for success in high school, college, and on the job.
5. Help your child to break up longer assignments, projects, and studying tasks into small chunks. You can sit down with your child and create a study schedule with them. Make sure that they do most of the work creating the study schedule! Sometimes, all you have do is sit their and ask them questions. You'll be surprised to find that your student will create the schedule largely by themselves, simply because you are sitting with them and encouraging them!
6. Study! Study! Study! Learning is hard work and requires a great deal of studying. Here are some studying tips:
- Many students (myself included) get more out of reading when they take notes at the same time. Students shouldn't just re-read material from class; they should make notes or annotation on classwork, take notes on a separate sheet of paper, make diagrams, or create flash cards.
- Sometimes we just have memorize things. I had to do this with hundreds of chemical reactions as a chemistry major in colleges, doctors have to do this with parts of the anatomy, hundreds of proteins and body chemicals, and hundreds (thousands) of medications. Yes, google and computers are changing exactly how much we have to memorize, but students still need to learn and remember basic facts. Creating flash cards, mnemonic devices ("Please excuse my dear aunt sally" for the order of operations), and repeated quizzing by friends and family will help build memory.
- Studying can happen anywhere. Yes, some studying should happen in a study space (desk, kitchen table, etc.), but you can also study while waiting for the bus, waiting in a Dr's office, or quiz yourself while helping to make dinner!
- Make sure your child knows the basics. By middle school, your student should know their basic math facts, basic grammar constructions (periods on sentences, spelling of their, there, and they're), and have solid reading skills. If they, don't they need to practice these tasks at home until they have mastered them!
- Help your child remember what strategies work best for them. "Remember when you made all those flash cards and received an A+ on your vocabulary test? Why don't you try making flash cards again?"
7. Stay in touch with teachers. Teachers at TechBoston Academy are especially accessible by email. Don't hesitate to contact us with questions, concerns, or just in search of an update. Otherwise, we send home progress reports half-way through a marking period and report cards at the end of the marking period. You can also find homework assignments on teacher web sites and grades posted through Boston's new ASPEN system.
8. SLEEP! The American Pediatrics Association recommends that children who are 11-12 years old get 10-11 hours of sleep each night. That means that if your son or daughter is waking up at 6 AM for school, then they should be going to bed at around 8:00 PM in order to get 10 hours of sleep. Wow! That sounds incredibly early doesn't it? Unfortunately, TechBoston starts school early in part due to avoid difficulty with the buses and in part to facilitate access to sports and after-school activities. While I understand that it will be difficult to get any 11 or 12 year old to bed by 8:00 PM, please keep this in mind if your child is going to sleep around 9:00 PM, 10:00 PM or later. Getting adequate sleep plays a huge role in student success! PS It doesn't count as sleep if the student is in their bedroom but playing video games, texting, or on the computer! :-)
9. Remember, you're the boss! Establish rewards systems for your child when they meet goals and consequences when they don't do required work. Great rewards include going to the park together on the weekend, staying up late together on a Friday, or getting to have a sleep-over or get-together with friends. Consequences can include loss of computer privileges, loss of cell phone, or no tv. Don't forget to spell out what your child has to do to earn these privileges back!