Supporting Less Structured Play Time (aka Fun Unplugged)

There have been a lot of studies supporting the idea that playing is essential to healthy childhood development. The generation before mine frequently bemoans the fact that today’s kids are glued to the television rather than romping around outside playing impromptu games of tag and soccer, and this complaint is probably a fair one. However, the reason today’s kids have become dependent on technology (whether it’s a television show or a Playstation) is because their parents don’t encourage unstructured play time.

To be fair, a true unstructured play time may involve no parental intervention. However, if you’re looking for a little less Lord of the Flies and a little more kids playing catch, parental intervention is definitely necessary. So how can you support your child’s play time?

Limit the Tech
I enjoy watching some television to unwind after a long day, and I’m definitely not alone in this sentiment. The problem is that sometimes, technology can get out of control, especially as it becomes increasingly portable. To unplug your kids, then, is going to take some work. Keep all portable technology in a central location, perhaps in a basket in the living room near the television, and you will be able to monitor usage more easily. Set a limit on the amount of television that can be watched or the amount of electronic game playing that can go on.

But I’m BOOOOOORED
Just taking away the technology is probably not going to be enough. While the vast majority of families do have plenty of things available to facilitate a well-rounded play time, the biggest problem is making sure these items are accessible. If the hockey net is buried in the back of the garage under a stack of deck chairs, your kids won’t be able to access it. Make sure, then, that anything your kids might want to access is within easy kid reach, or make yourself available to help dig it out.

Get It Together
Along similar lines, it can be frustrating for kids to decide to play a game of baseball, only to find out that a glove is missing. Try to group all the supplies needed for an activity together. Big plastic bins labeled with markers can be a great tool.

Encourage Creativity
Of course, not all unstructured play has to take place outside or involve sports. Some kids really enjoy building with Legos or playing with a dollhouse. This kind of imaginative play is just as important as playing sports. Rather than buying the latest video game for your child’s next birthday, head to your local hobby and craft mart and pick out something that involves a little more hands-on creativity.

What are some other tips you have for supporting play time?

Stop…It’s Homework Time!

Back to school also means back to homework. By the end of September, students and families are really starting to get back in the swing of having classes, and teachers are starting to hand out increasing amounts of homework. While many students start the year off with the best of intentions and keep up with their homework, as the workload picks up many students start to see their motivation and organization slide. So how can you help your child stay on the straight and narrow? Here are some tips that have helped some of our students (and our kids!) keep up with homework.

Timing is Everything
Setting up dedicated homework time (even when your child claims he or she doesn’t have any) where your child sits in a designated spot in the house to work on homework makes getting work done part of the routine. Make this time mandatory for a reasonable length of time (that you decide on through discussions with your child), with the clear expectation that your child will work until the work for the next day is completed. If your child starts whining that the work is finished, work on weak areas or getting ahead on big assignments.

Priorities
Make homework a priority in your home by putting it before television, playing outside, talking on the phone, or getting on the computer for recreational purposes. Again, constant communication with your child is important. Many kids need time to unwind after the school day, so spending an additional 45 minutes doing math problems immediately after getting off the bus may not be a recipe for success for most kids. Be open to negotiations. If your child wants to watch one tv program or ride her bike to the corner and back before getting started on homework, be flexible. It’s important to get homework done, obviously, but it’s also important that your child has balance in his life and the ability to unwind.

Supplies
A lot of time doing homework can be wasted trying to find the necessary supplies. Whether it’s coloring in a bar graph or assembling a poster for a science project, your child is going to need quite a few supplies handy. Set aside a homework cupboard or drawer where your child can find everything he or she might need to cut down on frustrating time spent digging through drawers for a red crayon.

Be Available
Sometimes children struggle with homework, and they may struggle silently. By having someone available to help your child with homework, you can catch problems early on. Rather than finding out Sally Sue can’t add when she fails the unit test, you’ll find out one evening before dinner when she gets twenty-five problems wrong on her worksheet. This strategy can cut down on frustration for children, families, and teachers. Just be careful not to do your child’s homework. You’re there to help, not to take over.

What are other tips you’ve found helpful for getting homework done?

Sunday Morning Shout Out

Source: http://www.blogacademyoflearning.com/?attachment_id=1068

As the new school year continues to take hold, both parents and students alike must look at the concept of balance. While much seems to get written for parents on this issue, less seems available for students, particularly high school and college students. When it comes to looking at school work, extracurricular activities, part-time work, and having some sort of social life, how does a student find balance?  How do you still sleep? One website I visited recently brought it together well.

University Language’s site “How to Balance School and Work,” provides a good checklist for working high school and college students to keep in mind. It first discusses getting organized. Whether it is through an app or an old-school agenda, it suggests scheduling all activities, due dates, work meetings, and social events in one place. Thus, it is that much easier to schedule or no when not to schedule those things that are just extra in your life. It is that much easier to see the big picture when the big picture is right in front of you.

In a similar vein, it is important to schedule study time. Some students work out of necessity. Others work for extra spending money; while still others work mainly to boost the resume. Whatever the exact reason or reasons, it is important to schedule study time each day. It needs to be treated like an appointment that cannot be broken and for its slated purpose. Doing face book or the like is not a slated purpose!

It is also important not to overbook. Before adding anything new activities to your schedule, it is important to ask yourself if it is essential. While extracurricular activities are great, overdoing them is like overdoing anything else. Also, they fail to impress a prospective school or employer if it is at the expense of your GPA.

With working and going to school, it is important to ask for time off during key times. If you normally give your work due diligence and give your boss fair notice, asking for time off during mid-terms or finals should be very acceptable. It is better than calling in during these weeks at the last minute.

Lastly, make time for sleep. If you schedule your classes, work, extracurricular activities, and social life accordingly, there should be time for adequate shut-eye. (At least most of the time). Sleep is essential for health, true learning, and good job performance. Avoid the pitfalls of all nighters, plan ahead!

Navigating After-School Activities

Source: http://www.ihsa.org/NewsMedia/PortersCorner/tabid/537/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/86/National-High-School-Activities-Week.aspx

Most families have hectic morning schedules where it takes a small miracle to get everyone dressed, ready, fed and off to school on time. But that’s just half the battle! Having active students is a blessing, but getting them to their after-school activities can also be difficult for the busy parent. Here time management, organization and planning are essential for success. It’s also a great opportunity for parents to teachtheir students these valuable life skills. Here are some tips from the experts on how to navigate the quagmire of after-school activities.

The Family Meeting
A successful activity weeks starts with the family meeting. Make it fun by handing out treats or allowances at the end of the meeting. You can also get your students to chair the meeting because being involved will mean they participate and pay attention. Family meetings mean each member of your family stipulates their needs and is aware of other events taking place during the week. Write all the events on a family calendar which is can be seen at a glance. Put this on the back of the door or in the kitchen. Plan how and when each family member with get to their activities.
In addition to the family calendar, you can also utilize phones, computers and diaries to remind students of upcoming events and arrangements.

Ride Share
Network with other parents to minimize your transport needs. Make sure that your student knows who their lift will be on any given day. Networking with other parents can also mean that your students can have study groups with their friends when you are waiting for a sibling to complete an activity.

Plan Ahead
Activities bags must always be packed the night before so that any missing sports gear can be located and uniforms can be washed and packed. Also plan meals as hungry students are cranky students. Always keep a stash of snacks and drinks in a cooler in the car in case your student misses a meal or needs a little energy. You can also keep fun activities in the car for siblings who are along for the ride. Siblings can also utilize the time to do their homework.

Student Empowerment
As your students get older, leave more and more of the arrangements up to them. Of course you can oversee their plans and remind them of upcoming events, but making arrangements among themselves will make them feel empowered, involved and more understanding of the needs of others. When you students have made the arrangements for who gets a lift and who gets a ride with you, there may be less dissatisfaction at the outcome. It’s also important to remember that going home signals a wind-down period for most students. This makes it more difficult to get them back on the go. Avoid stopping at home after school and then going out again later.

After school activities can be a challenge, but they are well worth the effort.

(Original Post is from our Tutor Doctor headquarters blog posted 9/17/13 and titled ‘How to Successfully Navigate After-school Activities‘

Sunday Morning Shout Out

Source: http://handsonblog.org/2012/08/13/the-new-school-year-means-its-time-to-volunteer/

It’s a new school year and that sense of great possibility is strong! There are many things floating around the internet about back to school success. Many things that are said are tried and true. As parents, we probably know we should have our children eat a good breakfast; get enough rest; have a specific place and time to do homework; encourage a good balance between activities and down time; communicate well with teachers about our child’s specific needs, etc. But one article I read brought all this together in a more compelling way. “10 Steps to School Year Success,”

In summary the “she knows “ editors suggested the following things:

1. Establish consistent routines. This means being cognizant of not only your children’s but your own activity load,  to  establishing a consistent time for homework, dinner, and rest for all. Seeing how everyone’s designated activities fits in the overall scheme of things and keeping things moderate and realistic help everyone’s needs get met.
2.  Set reasonable bedtimes: Poor sleep effects young and old, with bad behavior and problems with learning in the younger set and accidents, illness, and poor work performance in adults who do not get enough rest. Set a bedtime and stick to it! According to the National Sleep Foundation, 10 to 12 hours is recommended for elementary school aged students. Experts say add ten to twenty minutes to the time it takes your child to fall asleep, when coming up with the right bed time. -Probably no later than 8:30 for this age group.
3. Learn to say “no”: We live in an age where child and adult alike have a myriad of activities to choose from. The editors of this article suggest, as would “slow family movement” proponents that children and families need more downtime with one another, instead of more activities. This is where real reflection and learning are allowed to occur (not to mention quality family time) as children and parents have a chance to digest the day.
4. Limit t.v. time: This speaks for itself, with the added point that children learn best by  being actively involved in what they are doing( reading, drawing, playing, building, talking, and exploring). Television makes all of us inactive observers.
5. Encourage reading: One of the strongest predictors of academic success is reading. When parents ask teachers how they can get their children to learn in school, teachers often reply, “Get them reading!” Why: Reading opens new world and ideas for children; builds vocabularies; gets them critically thinking; improves their memory; and grows their imagination.
6. Support your child’s teacher: Unfortunately, our current times are finding teachers at the receiving end of a lot of criticism. When children, teachers, and parents work together and support one another, success is far more likely.
7. Enlist support:  We all seem to be in overdrive, as we navigate our days. Who isn’t overwhelmed at times, as they multitask through the day? Do not be afraid to ask a family member or friend for help and be that family member or friend who will help when you can!
8. Practice what you preach: Model what you ask of your child in terms of your manner; your work habits;  and the way you treat your partner and them. Children copy us and our practices.
9. Plan ahead: The adage, fail to plan, plan to fail holds true. If you can anticipate contingencies in life and plan around them, you and your child will be better off.  For example, it’s probably not the best time to start dance lessons or a new sport when state assessments are going on. Wait till they are over if possible. Or even with simple things like the weather, be planful. If you drive your child to school every day, plan for fog, slushy, slippery roads or even nice weather that may mean roadwork.
10. Keep your eye on the prize: Education is really one of our children’s largest gateways to success in life. If we want our children to succeed, keep the big picture in mind. By doing everything we can to help our children be successful in school and combining it with a healthy, family life outside of school, we are going a long way to helping them do well now and then do well later.

A Plethora of Papers

One of the constants of my life since starting school way back in kindergarten has been the excessive amounts of paper that seem to accumulate. Whether it’s homework sheets or field trip permission slips or fundraising paraphernalia, school produces a lot of paper. When I was in school, I did a spectacularly bad job of keeping these papers organized. My locker would build up a solid base of compressed papers, my backpack zipper would frequently snag on the stray papers that I would randomly shove in among my books and binders, and my notebooks would be overflowing with old papers.

Of course, keeping every paper is not feasible, nor is it particularly conducive to organization. So what can you do to help you or your child take better care of papers? First of all, set up a few minutes each day to go through new papers and figure out where they belong. The saying “a stitch in time saves nine” comes into play here. Letting papers accumulate for more than a day means you’ll have a bigger mess to deal with, so take the time up front to control the onslaught. Obviously, recycle the papers that aren’t necessary, but don’t just let the necessary papers grow into a huge messy pile of their own. For classes, make sure you have a binder or folder that papers can be put into. The easiest way I’ve found to stay organized is to put the date in the upper right-hand corner of each paper I get, which makes it easy to refile a paper if it somehow ends up out of place.

As for permission slips and other, long-term papers (such as fundraising sheets), try having bins for each child in the house. These bins will still need to be gone through, but not necessarily on a daily basis.

What are other tips you have for managing the major influx of papers that school brings?

I’ll Write This Post Later

Here at TutorDoctor WNY, we talk a lot about procrastination, probably because that is the academic challenge that I have struggled with the most. I’ve tried all kinds of advice to get over my procrastination, but nothing has worked. The reason it hasn’t worked can best be summed up by the old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Save the game playing for after work is completed. (Image Credit:http://www.ehow.com/how_2108252_stop-child-procrastinating.html)

The point is, my procrastination ain’t really broke. I’ve never been punished for procrastination in a meaningful way. That project I started the night before it was due? I got an A on it. The test I spent twenty-minutes before class cramming for? A-.

Well, when I say I haven’t been punished, I mean in the sense that my grades have never visibly suffered from my procrastination, and I’ve never had a professor or a teacher seriously confront me about my tendency to push deadlines to the extreme. All the suffering of procrastination has been internalized as anxiety and nausea and academic paralysis.

Talking about procrastination often becomes a case of which came first, the chicken or the egg. I’ve read a lot of interesting articles and blog entries discussing how procrastination is the result of fear and anxiety. This could very well be true. After all, just because I don’t feel fear or anxiety when first given a project doesn’t mean that it isn’t there, waiting to manifest later. I’ve always attributed this later emergence to the fact that I’m concerned I won’t make a deadline.

Of course, if I’d missed a few important deadlines, maybe I would have defeated my procrastination a long time ago. Maybe I would have realized that the Nike slogan of “Just Do It” was applicable to more than sportswear. Beating procrastination only gets harder the older you get, because it becomes ingrained as a habit. This is the way I’ve always done my work–pushing it to the last possible second.

There are lots of ways to help your child become less prone to procrastination. Tutoring can be a great way to get kids on track with work. Tutoring sets up a routine for getting work done, and tutors can also monitor progress on long-term projects to make sure they are completed in a timely manner. A lot of the problem with procrastination is an inability to just sit down and get to work, and having another person there ready to help get the work done is a great motivator.

For older students, staying after school to get extra help from teachers can also be a good motivator. Even if your child isn’t struggling in a subject area, having time set aside to be in a classroom setting surrounded by other people getting work done can be helpful. If your school doesn’t offer after school help, encourage your child to start a study group with friends at the local library or at someone’s house. Being surrounded by productivity can be contagious, after all.

Modeling good behavior yourself is also an important part of parenting. Talk to your child about procrastination, but also show him or her that you don’t procrastinate, or that you’re working to overcome it. Set up a day where you pay all your bills once a week. Have a calendar displayed prominently in your house that has important dates and deadlines written on it. Set up a place where your child can put permission slips and other things that need to be signed so you can take care of those things they night they’re brought home rather than waiting until the morning of the trip.

 

Fridge Cups

One of the great things about the internet is that it becomes  a community where ideas can be shared. This morning, while doing my morning blog perusal, I happened upon this great idea that fits perfectly with the kids in summer theme we have going on. The author of the post claims that she was tired of her kids asking for a drink multiple times a day in the summer only to take out a new cup each time. This great idea cuts down on the amount of dishes that will have to be done and will encourage your kids to drink more water.

So what did the author do? She put her cups on the fridge. She bought light-weight plastic cups (or you can use cups your family already has), and attached magnets using hot-glue. Voila! The one thing that the post doesn’t mention is writing names on the cups. In my family, where my brother and I unfortunately shared a toothbrush for a few weeks due to lack of communication, we would definitely need to write the names on the cups.

The whole process is incredibly easy. Rather than washing a ton of cups every day, you only have to wash a few. Furthermore, if the cups are just used for water, a quick rinse will do throughout the day, so it will only be one wash at the end of the night. Check out the original blog entry for detailed instructions and pictures (personally, I think the fridge cup magnets look rather charming).

What are some other time-saving tips you have for parents in the summer?

You Don’t Know What You Got ‘Til It’s Gone

As part of my entrance into the blogverse, I started reading other blogs. The wealth of material available through blogs has constantly amazed me. From cooking and gardening blogs to parenting blogs and education blogs, the amount of creativity, beautiful photography, and knowledge that is being shared, all for free, has truly enriched my life. One of the more recent trends I’ve been noticing is minimalist living, which I’ve defined as “having the least amount of stuff possible to lead a happy, fulfilling life.” I’ve read a lot of different blogs that give tips on how to start a minimalist life, and while I never think I’ll be a minimalist master, I do think that there are aspects to the idea that can be incorporated into any life.

Kids can get into the minimalist way of life too! (Image Credit: http://www.organizedbytina.com/2010/08/16/how-kids-can-organize-their-own-rooms/messy-kids-room/)

My own foray into minimalism came after a horrific marathon of Hoarders. I went to my room at my parent’s house immediately and threw out an entire trash bag of stuff. Since then, I’ve been making small attempts at limiting the amount of things that I have in my life in order to focus more on how the things I have improve my life. That doesn’t mean I have to get rid of things like art or souvenirs–after all, those sorts of items impact my life by making my surroundings beautiful and by making my space feel like home. After all, what would the white walls of my apartment look like without my cork board, my framed art prints, or my photographs? However, it may mean that rather than spending my money on another knick-knack, I might spend my money on going kayaking or a fantastic vacation.

It’s all about cost-benefit analysis. Will the item I’m considering adding to my life add any benefit to it? Would that benefit be outweighed by a potential future benefit that I could have spent the money on? Minimalism also requires that I use long-term planning rather than just short-term impulse. As for things that I already have laying around the house, as I’m planning to relocate within the next few months I’m going to be mindful of what items make it into the “Move” boxes, and which go into the “Donate” or “Ditch” boxes.

Sunday Morning Shout Out

Driving around doing errands the other day, I was reminded that Administrative Assistant Day is coming up next week. While I have nothing against administrative assistants, it got me thinking about my own holiday I am starting. It’s called “ Happy Mad Dash Parenting Day”

“Happy Mad Dash Parenting Day” has its origins, well, in your parents. Perhaps you first learned about it as you were, unbeknownst to you, driving your own parents’ mad dash. Maybe you first noticed the sweat beads on their foreheads as a young child asking for the umpteenth glass of water before bed. Or, perhaps you first spotted a slight parental twitch when you went on a sleep-over and decided to come home at 11pm at night. No … I know, it was the strange way your mother grit her teeth every time you came home excited to do an end of term project. Could it be that it was due in two days and half of your grade was based on your project?

Mad dash parenting seems more the normal then the exception for most parents at least at certain times. Sweat beads, slight parental twitch, and grated teeth at the moment, we are trying  to negotiate a dance class and two separate baseball practices for our daughters tomorrow night.  There is also a birthday party to be had this weekend. (Don’t these things sound good when we are considering them months earlier? So break out the , EMERGENCY CHOCOLATE! This is a signature food of this special holiday. Give me instant energy and yum! Top that with a cup of strong java, the official drink of this holiday. Who needs sleep with this holiday  favorite?  Make sure you wear your festive attire! Any old thing laying around will do. Don’t worry about that button you missed on your shirt! It’s not a look of disheveled you are sporting, but one of festivity that connotes you’re really participating well in the mad dash. It mixes nicely with the sweat beads, twitch, and grated teeth anyways.

So when you see a fellow mad-dasher, remember that this is all just a state of mind. You can give them a “happy mad dash parenting,” card, some chocolate, coffee, or just a big bear hug in sympathy.  Someday soon the children will be grown and we will be bystanders watching our own children, with their children, doing the mad dash. Walk anyone?