Academic Behaviors
Some of the skills required on the journey to becoming the best student your child can be are hidden skills. They’re not multiplication, division, measuring angles, learning how to tell the parts of speech or even how to communicate in an essay.
No, the behaviors that a student (and eventually, adutls) will need to thrive are much more than mastery of knowledge. They’re deeper and they’re transferrable to any subject, all industries, and in various contexts.
1. Time management
When your child is given 15 minutes for a specific in-class assignment, he or she must understand that’s not an enormous amount of time. It may be to review his or her notes before a test, to discuss a project plan with a partner, or to read the next section of a text. Learning how to use their time well always benefits students.
2. Self-advocacy
While parents advocate for children when they are young, that responsibility needs to slowly transfer from the parent to the student as a child gets older. Typically, we begin coaching parents about how to let their child advocate for themselves in late elementary and early middle school. It’s a skill they’ll need to practice frequently before they get to high school and college, where they’re expected to have advocacy mastered.
3. Collaborative skills
How a student works with others is very revealing about how he or she will function in the world at large. Does he complain when work is assigned? Does she take over the conversation and not allow for others to give input? These are aspects of collaboration that need to be worked out over time.
While there are additional academic behaviors that our teachers assess regularly, these are a great starting point to launch you into “coach” mode over the summer. In fact, you can even do this without your child knowing if you have an eye-roller in your brood. (We’ve got a few of those, too; it’s an age thing, we promise! They WILL grow out of it.)
So, how do you take a summer and work on these skills? We’ve got some ideas.
Summer Opportunities to Coach Academic Skill-Building
Think about what you already do in the summer: pool time, travel, summer reading, hangout time with friends and family, backyard barbecues, and appointments like sports physicals, getting a haircut, and new glasses. You don’t need to create anything separate from what you’re already doing to help your child develop these skills.
First, look at your weeks, one at a time. What do you have coming up that could help your child develop teamwork and collaboration skills, self-advocacy or better time management?
Second, choose one of those calendar items. For example, if you know your child will need a haircut in the next few weeks before you go on vacation, coach him or her to call the hairdresser and set up an appointment. You can talk about what he or she wants in a hairstyle, which stylist is a good fit, and what dates and times are doable.
Then, you can help your child with phone etiquette, especially if he or she is in the older elementary school age. That may be all you do at that age: Prepare your child to understand what information is important in self-advocacy for a haircut appointment. If your child is in middle or high school, they’re capable of making the appointment without you once you’ve agreed on some of the details.
Let your older student call the hair salon or barber, ask to set up the appointment, and provide necessary details. Learning how to make an appointment in the summer gives your child agency. This is the kind of agency that creates a sense of healthy ownership, which translates to the next grade level.
That test your child missed because he was sick? It will be much easier for him to set up a retake time after he’s prepared to advocate for himself. A summer haircut is a terrific opportunity to do that.
Once your child has made the appointment, ask him how it went. Did he get flustered? Was there a question he didn’t know how to answer? Knowing you’ll still be in their corner gives children the confidence they need to try something imperfectly.
Another example may be learning how to collaborate with others. This is where a summer task that needs to be completed can come in.
Perhaps you’ve got to organize the family beach supplies before a trip, and you’ll need a few helpers to do that. Help your children understand what’s needed, where to find it, and any other packing specifications you have. Then, let them work together to ensure all the necessary items are in the family car before you leave.
We would recommend not making him or her a list; instead, let your child decide how he or she works best — and let their siblings work with them to compile the supplies. Maybe they decide that one of them should make the list and the other one should fetch the items. Or maybe they work together to build the list and divide and conquer to find the necessary items.
Learning how to work with someone else to complete a task is something you can build into a weekly process if it’s a skill your children need more practice doing. Packing sunscreen, beach towels, buckets, shovels, sunglasses and water bottles is a small task that can build big skills.
Before you leave for the beach, go through the list you’d originally asked them to prepare and bring with you on the trip. Did they get all the items? If not, talk through how they worked together and how they could work better next time.
Knowing you’ll still be in their corner gives children the confidence they need to try something imperfectly.
Time management is something we can all practice and develop.
Help your child boost his or her time management skills by helping him or her set reading goals and continuing to assign household responsibilities, such as caring for the family pet or making their own lunch before they go to a friend’s house. Even small responsibilities can help a child understand that time is finite.
An example might be that your 10-year-old is going to a friend’s neighborhood pool for the day. Let her know she’ll need to pack a lunch that morning before heading out. If time runs out and she doesn’t pack a lunch, you can decide to let her suffer the consequences of her preference for sleeping in over packing a lunch. Throw an apple and some crackers together for her, send her on her way and talk about it later when you have time.
While she had something to eat, it probably wasn’t her ideal lunch. That’s definitely the point. Letting our children understand that time matters is the first step to helping them manage it well.
Which academic behaviors do you want to teach this summer?
Find out more about our school at the next Discover Learnwell. Or you can contact our admissions team to ask specific questions. We also partner with homeschooling families to help them shift their focus from the planning that can eat up so much of their time to what they started homeschooling for in the first place: having more time to spend with their family.