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I am a teacher and have worked with children for 20 years ,in various different cities , countries, schools, and ages of children.
I have my own 4 sons , 2 of which are ADHD. I tutor primary school children in maths , Afrikaans and Xhosa. I have my own art studio for classes with children age 4-12 and adults.
Over these years I have come to have a deep empathy and understand some of the barriers to learning children experience. I am not a remedial teacher but I have gathered some tips that I would like to share.
1. Seek help early - If you are concerned about your child's learning, seek help - there are many professionals who can assist you in supporting your child
2. Schools should be equipped to help you find some help for your child , either in the school or by recommending someone outside of the school
3. leaving a potential problem to hopefully "sort itself out", in my experience, simply does not work.
4. If your child is getting help from a tutor or having extra lessons......
* be constant by keeping the weekly time slot booked
* Give it time - children often need time to consolidate information and concepts and that is what the extra work is providing.
* building confidence is a KEY - often, children have lost confidence in their ability. Extra help is a way to build back some foundational work so the child can feel that I can do this feeling
and so YOU play a big part in building confidence by what you say and or do not say
* keep up communication with you class teacher
* work at home - doing some times tables or a game on decimals on the computer are two small ideas for home practice.
* keep it short and make it fun!!
* Be Patient- realise that it is a process that takes as long as it takes. We can not rush a child through the stage of learning he or she is at.
* Have realistic expectations- extra help is not a miracle work and it might be that the extra help simply keeps the child learning steadily and not raises the mark up to an A
Tips for organsing thinking
One of the barriers to learning is what I like to call the brains filing system.
Children learn a whole lot of different concepts in a given subject. Subjects like science and history are easy to put into the filing system because each section is often taught as a whole and the concepts belonging to that section stay together.
However, in areas like maths, English and other languages, concepts are taught throughout the year and from year to year. These concepts build on one another and are scattered or not taught as a single unit.
Children often have a chaos in the brain in these subjects. In other words all the separate concepts are not clearly in the files in the brain.
How to help?
1. help your child to clearly head all his or her work in the workbook
2. use colour post it notes to classify sections of work that belong together - is use these in the text book too
3. You might even like to get a separate file or folder and colour code all the work into sections . When your child is studying, he can then put all his "werkword" learning together into his file.
This process helps any child to organise his thinking and learning and then it helps him to retrieved the information more easily from he right file in the brain.
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