6) Whether they admit it or not many children are nervous about the move to secondary
school; what can parents do to reassure them and prepare them for the new
environment?
Very little.
Moving from the security and more family nature of primary school to the more formal and less
personal nature of secondary school is a big step up but that’s life. It is all part of growing up
which requires us always to be handling bigger and bigger challenges until one day we are ready
to venture out into the world and handle any challenge the world may throw at us.
All we can really do as parents is to tell our children how we handled similar situations in our
own life,
what worked and what didn’t work and reassure them that it was all worthwhile. Help
them to see the purpose of secondary education, the goals that are worth achieving and why.
Children need to understand the relevance of their education to their personal future so they
can take ownership of it and overcome any difficulties.
What parents can do is:
1) make sure their children know that they will support them no matter what
2) make sure they have all the information they need to make good decisions
3) put in place the best possible home study strategies they can.
Getting Involved:
The biggest difficulty I have always had is simply getting involved.
Like you I am sure, I find my
own life to be very busy and there is not much time available to get involved in my children’s
schooling and it is so much easier just to leave it all up to the school. Also my children do not
want me to be involved, they do not want to be picked out as having an interfering parent and
would much sooner I just kept out of it! And of course I have chosen the school they attend
because I believe it will do a good job for them so my tendency is to just let them get on with it.
And I have found that schools often encourage that approach. They want parents involved if
there are performances to attend, sports teams that need coaches or extra transport, fund
raising for specific projects or discipline matters to attend to but involvement in the processes of
learning? Generally not encouraged in my experience.
But this is the area that pays the biggest dividends.
The right information;
Beginning a new year the information you need to obtain from the school is:
1) All your child’s subjects details
- teachers names for each subject and contact phone numbers or email addresses if you
can get them
- subject assessment structure – % internal assessment, % exams for every subject
- assessment schedule for the year – especially timing of major exams
-
website and parents access to subject information
2) Most schools do some kind of pre-enrollment assessment of students and form an idea of
what academic results they can expect from your child. You need to know what those
expectations are, stated as clearly as possible, that the school holds for your child for their major
assessments – IGCSE, GCSE, O-Level, A-Level, IB Diploma etc
3) The names (and email addresses if possible)of other important people at school – the Head,
the year Dean, any specialist teacher your child will be with, etc…
And the information you need to supply to your child’s teachers or pastoral supervisor is:
4) Based on your own past experience and records the subjects s/he is likely to excel in and
the subjects s/he may struggle in
Obviously textbooks, pens, books and other resources will need to be taken care of too.
Study at home:
What we are always seeking is to get our children into a rhythm, a habit of homework, review
and study, which needs to start as soon as possible.
1) encourage your children to get their homework done as soon as possible after coming home
from school
- this enables focused work to be completed while the brain is still functioning well and not
fatigued by the lateness of the hour
- they will often need to get their blood-sugar levels up by eating first but homework should be
next.
- of course this won’t suit everyone but if you make things like TV, video games, the internet etc
contingent on completion of homework then this process can become self rewarding
2) make sure they have a place to do school work which suits them physically – desk or table
and chair at the right height with good light
3) as a vital part of homework, each night all notes completed during the day need to be
reviewed – read through again.
- this will enable the connections made in the brain during the day to be reinforced within 24
hours and facilitates the process of shifting information into long term memory
4) as part of the review process, on a regular basis, maybe once a week, key-point summaries
need to be made in each subject to consolidate the main ideas and act as the basis of study
notes for the next exam
7)
Children are expected to take on a lot more responsibility for themselves at secondary
school; what advice and tips can parents offer them to help them cope?
Once again the only thing parents can really do for the child is to connect taking more
responsibility to growing up and becoming more adult. All children want to grow up but we
should be very careful about trying to accelerate that process. It is very useful for children to
take on board the idea of a good education being important for a successful future but the
message needs to be portrayed from the point of view of giving them more choices rather than
less. I have seen many parents over the years pressuring children to make career choices at a
young age and defining their subsequent subject choices in one direction on the basis of that
immature uninformed choice. A sound, broad based education provides a child with a range of
options, possibilities and choices for their future within which they may find the field that
interests them most. Narrowing the range of possible choices down at a young age greatly
reduces any child’s chances of finding the field they could excel in.
Taking responsibility at school is partly about good time management (see next heading) and
partly about the values of community like respect, integrity, care, leadership and facilitating
harmony.
These are also family values which are best taught by imitation.
The best lesson parents can ever give is to demonstrate all the values listed above through
taking responsibility for all their own actions and working within their community to lead by
example.
One idea that can help children to cope with the rigours of secondary school is to allow them to
form study groups with friends to share experiences and resources and to help each other with
study and homework. These study groups need to be occasionally monitored by parents though
to make sure your children are using the time together to get work done rather than engaging in
other less appropriate activities.