Falling behind on schoolwork can cause extreme disengagement from school as well as other mental and academic health consequences. Our best homeschooling tips for parents of students who have fallen behind is to learn how to manage their academics to prevent the problem from arising in the first place!
While students need to learn how to manage their work on their own, there are things parents can do to help lay the foundations to help get them started. As a parent, you might be wondering how you can manage your student’s academics when you already have so many other responsibilities. In this blog, we discuss 5 different homeschooling tips for parents that will help manage their student’s academics, catch up on school work, and avoid falling behind altogether.
Homeschooling Tips #1: Plan Their School Schedule
Our first homeschooling tip is to stay on top of schoolwork by maintaining a schedule. This means students need to schedule time in their day for school, studying, and homework. If you don’t maintain a schedule, it will be easy to lose track of what’s due. If you have a young student, make a “to-do” list to help them remember what’s due the next day and use fun motivators like stickers to place over the things they have completed.
Keeping a schedule is a great way to instill discipline in your student and prepare them for their future career. If they play on sports teams or take music lessons, planning their school schedule accordingly is vital to ensuring success across all facets of your young student’s life!
Homeschooling Tips #2: Prioritize Their Assignments
Your student can keep their grades up even when they’re very busy. Plan ahead with them and ask them what assignments they have coming up so that they can prioritize them accordingly. You’ll want to start with the important tasks first and consider the following:
- The assignment due date
- The length of the assignment
- The importance of the assignment or test (percentage weight of final grade)
- Their interest/academic level in the subject
If they have an assignment that is due tomorrow, you’ll probably want to prioritize that first. If their assignment requires several hours of your work to complete, then block time for that assignment throughout the week. Focusing a couple of hours a day rather than sitting down and completing it in one go will help to prevent burnout.
The importance of the assignment or test also plays a factor in how much time they will dedicate to a particular subject. For example, if an assignment is only worth 5%, it’s probably not worth spending hours upon end completing. However, an assignment worth 20% of your student’s grade is a big deal and the time invested to complete it should reflect its importance. Lastly, if your student is really struggling in one subject, shift your focus on that subject to improve your chances of getting a passing grade.
Homeschooling Tips #3: Get Help From Your Child’s Teacher
Our most important homeschooling tip for parents to help their student catch up on schoolwork is to reach out to your student’s teacher for help! Sitting down with your child’s teacher will allow you to better understand what’s expected from them. This will prevent hours of study time and will help you dial in on the areas that your child should focus on. For older students, you can encourage them to sit down and speak with their teacher on their own to promote ownership over their learning.
Remember that teachers are a valuable resource and they are happy to help their students succeed! Reaching out and asking for help directly is one of our no-brainer homeschooling tips that we encourage every student and parent to do.
Homeschooling Tips #4: Manage Their Mental Energy
It’s very easy to experience burnout if you are not considering your student’s mental energy. Getting a full night’s rest, eating the right food, and exercising can help keep your child’s mind in tip-top shape. If you still feel that they are mentally exhausted, that’s okay! Practice working on assignments in moderation. Try studying for 2 hours with a quick 20-minute break. This way, your child can come back to their studies with a fresh mind! Time blocking your student’s studies is a great way to optimize your student’s studying efforts. Remember, 1 hour of deep study time beats 3 hours of unfocused work.
Pro homeschooling tip: don’t underestimate the importance of sleep! Sleep is when memory consolidation occurs, meaning everything your student studies during the day will become encoded in their memory while they sleep. Sleep is essential to academic success and should always be prioritized over late-night cramming!
Homeschooling Tips #5: Create Your Own Study Guides
Another tactic on how to catch up on school work is to have your child create study guides for themselves. This will make it easier to revise and remember material. You can also create a study group that meets regularly to review materials together. This will help your child align their studies with the most important content and learn that studying with others can be fun!
How Novel Education Group Can Help You
If you find that your child requires more attention, book a free consultation with us today for private tutoring sessions! Novel Education Group offers subject-specific and elective course tutoring for all grade levels and subjects ranging from AP Chemistry, Statistics, and World History to graphic design, tennis, photography, Python programming, guitar, and cinema studies. Our tutoring is based on a personalized approach designed to meet student’s needs, build confidence, deliver results, and ultimately inspire them to love whatever it is they want to learn!
