As parents we are all keen to help our children gain the best possible education but sometimes it’s just not clear how we can do this.  Here are my top five tips for how to help your children at home:

Try to do little but often.  This is particularly helpful when learning multiplication tables.  I always ask children to practise a particular times table for one minute each night for a whole week.  When they say they haven’t got time to practise I point out that I am only asking for one minute out of the one thousand four hundred and forty minutes in a day!

Support the work that your child has been given at school.  If there are spellings to practise, do them together in short bursts every day.  A good method for practising spellings is ‘Look, Learn, Cover, Write, Check’:  Look at each word carefully so that you can Learn its shape and the letters it contains – Cover the word and Write it – Check that you have written it correctly.  If the word has got some mistakes in it, praise your child for the parts that are right then look carefully at how the word can be corrected.  As with the times tables, practising for just a few minutes stops the work from becoming boring.

It doesn’t have to be at home!  How about in the car?  This is an ideal opportunity to practise quick maths questions.  Challenge your child to answer questions such as ‘six add five’ or ‘twelve add seven’ as quickly as possible.  If these are too hard, try questions such as ‘seven add one’ or ‘fourteen take away one’, but if they are too easy move on to questions like ‘forty-six add fifteen’ or ‘eighty-two minus twenty-four’.

Make the work something to look forward to rather than something to dread.  Every child deserves a story every evening and if this becomes a regular routine most children love to hear an adult read to them.  The natural extension to this is for the child to read to the adult.  As with all activities, your child will not enjoy this if the book is dull or too difficult but one way to overcome this problem is to take it in turns to read – you could read a paragraph each or a whole page each.

Build your child’s confidence by encouraging them to take part in extra activities.  Your local area will have a wide range of sports activities taking place in the evening or at weekends, including football, swimming, trampolining and gymnastics.  Look out as well for other activities such as dance or theatre schools, which provide children with lots of fun as well as giving them confidence to stand up and perform in public – a skill that can be very useful in adult life.

Following these tips will help you to get across to your child that education is important and, yes, it can be hard work but it can also be a lot of fun.

By Andrew Brodie

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