Archive for the 'Child Education' Category

You may think that reading to your child is just a soothing bedtime ritual, but it is much more.

Reading to your child can make a significant difference in how smart your child is, and how well she does in school. [Child Education]

A child’s brain is not fully formed at birth, but rather responds to what it experiences. When you read to your child, brain cells in your child’s brain form a new connection.

The more you read, the more connections are created, and the more existing connections are strengthened.

This continues during your child’s first three years of life. After age three, connections that are regularly used continue to grow stronger, while connections that aren’t used begin to wither away. By age 10, most of the “wiring” in your child’s brain will have been completed.

One of the strongest predictors of future academic success is having been read to as a preschooler. This also improves a child’s intelligence and allows the child to form positive associations with reading as well as forming a stronger attachment to the person who is doing the reading.

New research shows that girls who attend single sex schools are more likely to get better exam results than those that don’t.

In particular those starting out with a below average grade level will benefit the most from an all female education.

The study carried out by the Good Schools Guide in the UK, looked at exam results over a two year period.

Of over 70,000 girls who attended single sex schools all of them did better than expected in their age relevant tests, compared to the over half a million female students in mixed education who did 20% worse than predicted by teachers.

It is commonly believed that by attending a school with an equal ratio of boys and girls results in a more rounded and relevant system of learning. That creates the perfect jumping board for the world of work and a career in the modern world.

The number of all girl schools in Britain is on the decline and there are now only 220,000 females taught in these types of establishments. This is a tiny minority of the total three million pupils in the education system currently.

It has long been recognized that the key to education in school work effectively is to get parents or guardians involved. [Child education]

In Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, they rolled out a novel approach by setting up a Parent University late last year.

Jerri Haigler is the executive director of the new program. He strongly believes that it will result in better grades and improved attendance rates.

The varied content was agreed by various interested groups from teachers to community agencies and is fairly comprehensive.

So far, over 2,500 adult family members have availed of the scheme with a very positive level of feedback. A large majority of attendees stated that they had learned a lot and plan to use the different techniques that they had been taught.

For a special Family Fun Day, held by the program in the US National Whitewater Center over nine thousand enjoyed a great day out.

Since it started in September 2008, it has increased the number of subjects covered to 64. These include health & wellbeing, parental awareness and personal development.  Interested parties can also benefit from learning about study skills, positive discipline and preparation for course tests.

Do you want to support your child at school? Being a parent, you obviously feel responsible to supporting your child’s education.

Besides achieving success at school, a parent’s involvement also helps your children to flourish in other areas of life.

However, if you can’t find a perfect way to execute your responsibility, here are a few clues for you to ignite ideas of helping your child through his/her education.

Talk more

Set aside some time to talk with your child every day in an interactive and calm manner. Make them realize that you have a genuine interest not only in their school work, but also in their likes and dislikes and hobbies.

Establish scheduled homework time

Regular time for homework every day, either in the afternoon or evening in a quiet place encourages your child to study well. Be supportive of your child in doing homework if they have problems.

This doesn’t mean that you should do the homework for them: doing this will only decrease your child’s interest and their confidence in achieving goals.

Discuss school events

Unfortunately under the Bush administration’s education reform programmes, many essential parts necessary for a school system to work have been neglected.

The schools need to follow up the basic learning side of schooling with more career study courses; they cannot possibly substitute the parent’s role in educating the child.

It is true that many families neglect their children’s upbringing due to their social and economical difficulties, but it is not the school’s role to substitute the parents.

Teachers have to get on with teaching, after all that what schools are for; there must be an open and continual dialogue between teachers and school leaders in order to pinpoint ensuing problems.

The evaluation test, which is carried out on students each year to assess their progress, cannot possibly solve the ever-arising problems during the school terms.

This method of evaluation is not reliable; the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) programme must be followed up by more teachers meetings to improve standards of education during the school year.

There would be no point in discarding the NCLB law by replacing it with a new educational reform, though it is important to improve and change some points within the programme.

Parental education is a strong predictor of socioeconomic status and children’s educational environment.

Nevertheless, some children continue to experience reading failure in spite of high parental education and support for learning to read.

University of Colorado at Boulder psychologists Angela Friend, John C. DeFries and Richard K. Olson examined if genetic and environmental influences on reading disability, the most commonly identified learning disability, interact with level of parental education.

In this study, 545 pairs of identical and fraternal twins were selected wherein at least one of the twins in each pair had a reading disability. In addition, the researchers obtained information about the parents’ years of education.

The results, described in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, showed that there was a significant interaction between parents’ years of education and the heritability of reading disability.

Children whose parents had higher levels of education tended to have stronger genetic influence on their reading disability than children whose parents had lower levels of education.

Read more at ScienceDaily

When you look for a new job, or for a new house don’t you invest a lot of your time and energy towards the search?

Choosing the perfect pre-school for your child is almost as important, if not more, because this is the place where your child will spend a chunk of her time during her crucial formative years.

The environment must be a nurturing one and the staff must be loving and affectionate towards children in general.

Here’s what you can do: Check out your local newspaper or the Internet, or better, ask your friends, relatives, neighbors, and remember that unless these people are really very pleased with their experience, they wouldn’t recommend it to another.

Talk to them and find out how their child fared in the pre-school they used, and if there were any problems with it.

Once you have zeroed in on a few, find out how much it would cost you. Also, measure the distance from home to school, and find out if it is practical or feasible for you to take your child to a distant pre-school, when there may be another one closer.

Because the formative, pre-school years - three and four years - are when feelings of self, God and others begin to formulate, they need to be treated with the utmost care.

An experimental age, children of pre-school years often want to feel (taste, smell, touch and hear) things for themselves and begin to show curiosity towards learning new things.

They learn through personal experience or through their playing activities.

Because pre-school years are the foundation of the child’s emotional and spiritual development, parenting a pre-school child is both exciting and challenging for most parents.

It is an excellent opening to build a better foundation for the kid’s life. The pre-school years - the first five years of life - are highly significant, as the things that children learn and feel during these years can have an impact on their rest of their lives.

Like all of us, pre-schoolers have specific needs. As a parent, you need to know their needs and find ways to fulfill them. Remember, the greater your understanding of pre-schoolers, the more effective the ministering will be.

Needs of Pre-school Children

Love and Care

Troubled children hurt their classmates’ math and reading scores and worsen their behavior, according to new research by economists.

The researchers linked domestic violence cases to 4.6 percent of the elementary school students in their sample.

These children scored nearly 4 percentile points lower on standardized reading and math scores than their peers whose parents were not involved in domestic violence cases.

In addition, the children from households linked to domestic violence were 44 percent more likely to have been suspended from school and 28 percent more likely to have been disciplined for bad behavior. The impact was seen across genders, races and income levels.

Not only did children from troubled homes suffer, however: Test scores fell and behavior problems increased for their classmates as well.

Troubled boys caused the bulk of the disruption, and the largest effects were on other boys. Indeed, adding just one troubled boy to a class of 20 children reduces the standardized reading and math scores of other boys in the room by nearly two percentile points.

And adding just one troubled boy to a class of 20 students increases the likelihood that another boy in the class will commit a disciplinary infraction by 17 percent.

Exam for students means a dreadful time to deal with. Exam time is very stressful for both parents and children [Child stress].

Stress in life is very helpful, as it inspires us to perform tasks and propels to achieve things enthusiastically.

However, too much stress is very damaging and it generally occurs when we lack confidence and worry that we are incapable of doing anything efficiently.

When exams are nearby, children often worry about their exams and buckle under some stress and pressure. Parents, on the other hand, also worry as much as their children do.

For them, it is something like experiencing their most horrible phase in life with full of stress. This stress leads to regular irritation, depression, fatigue, sleeplessness, headache, body pains, and lack of appetite.

The parental stress can also affect children, if parents undergo excessive stress because of their child’s exam. Loss of interest to study, memory lapse, lack of ability to concentrate for long periods and headache, mild fever, and stomachache are the result of parental stress in children.