Strategies to Help Your Child at Home
Homework
1. Establish a place where your child can do homework.
2. Make sure the materials your child will need--pencils, markers, crayons, paper, scissors, ruler--are available.
3. Identify the best time for your child to do homework. Some children need a break when they come home before beginning to work; others like to do what they can immediately. (Most parents find that it is best not to leave homework (other than reading) to do just before bedtime. Students are just too tired by then.)
4. If necessary, post a schedule that shows when homework is due and when your child will do it each day.
5. Decide with your child about rules, such as "No TV during homework time." Monitor how much time your child spends on homework. (This doesn't include getting a snack, bouncing balls, or running around the room!)
6. If your child is spending more than a reasonable time on homework each day, talk with the teacher.
Reading
1. Read aloud to your child as often as possible, every day if you can. Enjoying books together does more to help your child become a good reader than anything else you can do.
2. Set aside a time for your child to read aloud to you. Select books that are easy to read so your child can feel successful.
3. Resist the urge to ask your child to sound out an unknown word every time he or she stumbles. Talk about what word might make sense based on the rest of the sentence, or skip the word altogether and come back to it later. If you noticed that your child read that same word on another page, find it together. Or just tell your child the word. After all, the most important thing is that reading together be a pleasant experience.
4. Talk about the books you and your child have read--share what you like (or don't like), compare your opinions of the characters, or think about a time you did something similar to what you have read.
5. Encourage your child to read the print that surrounds you in everyday life--signs, directions, labels, addresses, the telephone book, messages on television, and the newspaper.
Writing
1. Have your child choose a favorite picture from a photo album and have them write a story about that time.
2. When interesting or funny things happen, talk with your child about how you could write stories about these events--begin by saying the first line, have your child say the next, and keep alternating until you have finished the story. Think about what would be a good attention getter and the order of the events. Have students dictate their story and then write it down.
3. Give your child a diary to write about what happened each day.
4. Invite your child to write captions for pictures in a family photo album.
Math
1. Play games together--dice games, board games such as Monopoly, and card games.
2. Talk about time: "It's half an hour (or 30 minutes) until dinner." Have a clock at home with numbers and hands (analog), not just digital. Then play games, closing your eyes, and seeing if you can predict when 10, or 30, or 60 seconds passes.
3. Involve your child in shopping for groceries and handling small amounts of money.
4. Record your child's height in inches and meters on a door, tape, or wall chart.
5. Look around the house for items that are about I centimeter, 1 inch, 1 yard, 1 foot
6. When driving in the car look on the license plates of cars and have students find the sum of all the digits. See who can find a car with a sum of 15 first.
7. Skip count together to help with fluency, and then ask students multiplication facts
Science
1. Encourage your child to collect and organize objects such as seeds, rocks, marbles, magnets and shells. Provide a magnifying glass and encourage investigations. You could ask, "What do you notice?" "Which ones do you want to group together?" Why?
2. Talk about scientific events that occur in your home: which cereals get soggy, why the food in the back of the refrigerator develops mold, why some plants need to be watered more often than others. Formulate scientific theories with your child about these observations and test them together.
3. Show your child that you are interested in science, too. Mix paints, weigh snow, study a rainbow, watch an anthill, predict the weather, and catch fireflies and let them go.
4. Sometimes, rather than answering your child's science question, trigger an investigation by asking questions. "Why do you think...?" "What would happen if...?" "How could we find out?"
5. Take your child to the library to borrow books and videos on many different science topics.
Social Studies
1. Talk about your family history. Share family artifacts and look at family photographs. Make a family tree.
2. Look at maps to see where relatives were born.
3. Teach your children the language of your home culture.
4. Explore the city, town, or community where you live. Make a scrapbook of the places you visit together.
5. Find out what your child is studying in school. Think about ways you and your child can gather more information about the topic.
6. Encourage family discussions about getting along with people. Talk about how you handle disagreements or problems with your friends, and encourage your child to talk about experiences at school.
7. Read books and stories about people of different racial, ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds and about people who lived long ago and in different parts of the world.
8. Talk about your beliefs and values and how they influence your thoughts and actions.