Academics – Page 2

✍🏻 Penmanship

Are you concerned about your child’s penmanship? Do you have to keep reminding them to write carefully and legibly? Do they find it hard to write clearly and neatly? There could be several reasons why a child could be struggling with these fine motor skills. The wrong positioning of the paper, not applying enough pressure, and holding the pencil the wrong way, could be some of the reasons for poor penmanship.

However, one of the most common reasons for poor penmanship is having weak hand muscles. If this is the problem, it could be considerably improved by using a few things at home. Here are some easy ways to tone the hand muscles and improve handwriting. The child will actually have fun doing these things at home. It could be in the form of play or helping you in the kitchen.

Transferring Objects: Take two bowls and fill one with lentils, beads, or anything else you have at home. Let the child transfer objects from one bowl to another. There are three stages. Do not go to the next stage until the previous stage has been mastered.

Stage one would be the whole hand grasp. Let the child pick a fistful of seeds and transfer it to the other bowl.

Stage two would be to use only the five fingers to pick and transfer from one bowl to another.

Stage three would be to use only the three fingers used for holding a pen or pencil. This would involve the middle, pointer, and thumb fingers.

Another variation would be to use a spoon, tongs or any other kitchen tool that requires precision to sort and transfer the objects from bowl to bowl. The size of the object depends on the age of the child.

Shaving Cream: Spray shaving cream on a surface, and let the child make letters, words or draw with their index and pointer fingers.

Kneading: Kneading is a good exercise for toning the hand muscles. Let your child help you in cooking, where kneading is required such as making something with dough. You could also make homemade playdough with flour and water.

Other: Stringing noodles, opening jars of various sorts, drawing, cutting, using spray bottles to water plants, clothespin, etc. are other things a child can do to help strengthen their hand muscles, and improve fine motor skills.

Usually, children love helping in the house. Doing these simple things would build their fine motor skills, improve penmanship, and have a wonderful helper in the making. Just don’t forget to make it fun, and keep it light.

🍭 The Use of Colors for Learning

How often do we walk into a room, and pause to look at something colorful that has caught our eye? What about when we look at educational toys? Is it not the array of colors that usually catches the attention at first? Most individuals are attracted to colors, some more than others. It can brighten or make something ordinary instantly attractive.

Just as colors bring things to life, the same way colors can bring richness to learning. It helps in making the educational process fun, meaningful, and creative. The use of colors is one of the easiest ways to enhance the studying process, especially if your child is a visual learner. There have been studies that show colors have a direct impact on attentiveness and motivation.

The use of colors to enhance learning can be easily be implemented at home. Here are a couple of examples:

The Magical Pencil: Buy regular pencils, with the exterior being of different colors and designs. When your young child is ready to study, let them pick a pencil they are attracted to at that moment. It is their special pencil to work with for that evening. Make it a fun activity where the child picks the color they want to work with at that time. You could have a conversation such as, “What magical pencil should we use today to help us with our math?”

Academic Concepts: Teachers are aware of how important it is to use colors while teaching. It is a known fact that students are more focused when they see the text come alive with colors. A variety of shades could be used in every subject to bring out the text, graphs, illustrations, charts, etc.

Memorizing: I have found this very useful in teaching writing. Let’s say you want your child to memorize how to write an expository, narrative, or an opinion paragraph. Assign each part of the paragraph a different color. For example, one color for both the topic sentence and the ending sentence. Use another color for the details. Put those assigned colors out ahead of time. The child then by the association of the colors, remembers what is involved in writing a paragraph. This association of colors and memorizing how to do something can be carried through in all subjects.

Workspace: This has to do with the use of colors where the child works. If your child gets easily distracted, then utilize more calming colors such as pastel green or blue around them. On the other hand, bold colors such as orange increase alertness. Yellow is supposed to be a good study color too. These colors could be added by putting objects such as vases, flowers, frames, etc. in the workspace.

Colors do help make the learning process more relaxed, fun and also helps to be more creative. It lowers the stress filters that a child might have with studying or doing homework. However, do not go overboard as that could defeat the whole idea, and be more of a distraction instead.

Do consider using colors with your child. It is an inexpensive, fun way to make education more enjoyable and meaningful.

🤦 Homework is a very frustrating ordeal with my child. She does not pay attention, and I have to keep repeating things. Do you have any tips on how to deal with this?

Learning Style

Is homework time a frustrating ordeal? Does your child not get a concept in spite of teaching it several times? Chances are that you are not taking into consideration the child’s modality of learning or learning style.

Gone are the days when a classroom setting was all about a teacher speaking, a student listening and learning. Now, teachers are trained to differentiate teaching according to the different learning styles. Even though there are numerous definitions out there on the different modalities, for this article learning style refers to how a child uses their senses during the learning process.

Usually, we all prefer one style of learning over the others. Identifying if your child is a visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner is the first step. Once you have identified your child’s preferred learning style, be creative and present the material suited to that learning style. When you have presented or taught the information taking your child’s learning style into consideration, you will see an improvement in the academic setting. In fact, this could be applied to all areas of life. So for example, the visual learner would learn better with diagrams, pictures, the auditory learner would like sound and music, and the kinesthetic learner would prefer the hands -on approach towards learning.

Ideally, information is given using all the modalities with more emphasis on your child’s learning process. So when teaching a subject like Math, visuals should accompany the explanation, and use the hands- on approach with manipulative to reinforce the learning. Knowing your child’s learning style can make homework time a much easier task. For, with this information, you can figure out what would be the best way to help the child understand/ learn and present the material accordingly.