Helping with Homestudy
The College encourages all parents to help their son with his homestudy tasks. Here are some tips to help make the experience a pleasant one for everyone, instead of becoming a nightmare! |
1. Parents are NOT assumed to have any knowledge about a particular subject or topic. If you do know something, great! If you don't know anything, that's fine too. Prior knowledge is not needed to help you son complete homestudy tasks.
2. Focus on the skills your son needs to work independently and not the content of any work. At school we use the '4Bs', Book, Board, Buddy and Boss. You can adapt this for use at home: Book - online textbook and exercise book of notes from class Board - the online Learning Management System called Schoolbox (mysbc.sbc.vic.edu.au) Buddy - phone or email a friend with a question, discourage the use of instant messaging as your son may disrupt their friend's homework! Boss - email the teacher with specific questions or issues. Saying 'I'm having trouble with my homestudy task' isn't much use to a teacher, encourage your son to clearly identify the difficulty he has encountered. 3. Think about how you would solve a similar problem at work or home and adapt it for your son. The problems students face while doing homework are the same as the ones faced by adults during their everyday life, you have many suggestions to offer! 4. Set up a public place in your home for doing homestudy and use the same place every night. Monitor his computer usage to make sure he is doing work. Many students sit in their rooms and surf the web instead of completing work. 5. Celebrate mistakes. No one learnt to walk, talk or kick a football on the first try, mistakes are part of the learning process. You can reduce frustration by telling your son that he needs to make 10 or 20 mistakes before he will get something right consistently, then count down from that number to zero. 6. Approach every task in a positive manner with an expectation that your son is capable of completing the task. Research has shown that a student's anxiety about a particular subject is most often connected to a parent's anxiety about the subject - this is especially true of maths. Academic struggles are not genetic! 7. Start homework soon after your son arrives home from school. This is when the knowledge and instructions from the day's lessons will be freshest in your son's mind and your son's homework will be the most productive and beneficial. 8. Consider reducing the number of your son's extra curricular activities. The College expects your son to do homework every night and on the weekend, it is essential that he still has plenty of down time to rest and relax. 9. Try to have a regular routine at home during the week to allow your son to develop regular homework routines and habits. 10. Be interested in the topics your son is covering and celebrate his learning. Learning should be exciting and fulfilling, even homestudy tasks. The reward for doing homework should be your son's increased knowledge and skills not a specific grade or mark. Celebrate and reward learning and effort, not the end result. |