10 Steps to school year success

10 ways to help your child succeed in school

When your child was a baby, you set your life around nap times and diaper changes, now your growing child needs you to set your life around school.

Establish consistent routines
Take the "year at a glance" approach. If you have a child starting first grade and one in fourth, one a musician and the other an athlete, then you must sketch out how you will achieve a balance between school, their activities, your work, and your activities.

It is best to look at all of these areas at once, so that you can spot the trouble areas. Once you have the big picture, it is time to ask how you can set up a regular routine to ensure that everyone s needs are met, including yours. Early in the school year, decide which activities will fit, and which will have to be postponed. One of the biggest areas of concern for modern families is activity overload. Avoid it!

Now that you know what activities you will be engaged in, decide where homework fits and set a regular time for it. Whether there are assignments or not, this should be the time of day that your child always does a little extra school work. When will you have dinner? If possible, make it at the same time every day and expect all family members to attend. Don t eat on the run! If you have to eat in the car in order to make everything fit, then you are doing too much!

Set reasonable bedtimes
Open any magazine in America and you might find a story on the cumulative sleep debt that Americans are suffering from. It causes accidents, ill health and poor work performance. It has the same effect on young students. Without enough sleep, their learning suffers as does their behavior.

Additionally, lack of sleep makes kids prone to getting sick, which means they miss school and get behind in their learning. Avoid these problems by setting a reasonable bedtime for your children and sticking to it. According to Jodi Mindell, PhD, a member of the National Sleep Foundation, elementary age children need between 10 to 12 hours of sleep each night. She also recommends allowing an additional 10 to 20 minutes to that amount to account for the time is takes your child to fall asleep. Keeping these requirements in mind, your child s bedtime should be no later than 8:30 pm.

Learn to say no
There are many demands placed on our time. There are after school opportunities galore: sports, music, drama, art and more. Parents have an equal number of options for after work activities. Parents want to provide the best for their children and many believe that giving them access to numerous opportunities is the best way to enhance their learning.

In fact, the best way to enhance a child s learning is to allow them to slow down and think about what happened in class and to talk to them about it. This type of reflection can only come when parents and children have some downtime together. I advocate the motto: Just Do Nothing.

Limit TV
Now, I ll be the first to admit that I love TV. I loved cartoons as a kid, and I love sitcoms and drama shows now. But I m careful not to watch TV to the exclusion of all other forms of entertainment. Kids are not as good at moderating their exposure to TV. They need the help of their parents to make good choices and to limit the time spent being a passive observer. Kids learn best when they are actively involved in what they re doing. Reading, talking, exploring, drawing, building, playing -- these are all important parts of childhood. Make sure that they don t get squeezed out by too much Scooby Doo.

Next page: 6 more steps to schoolyear success