Helping Children Take Control of Their Learning

By: Klmiller


Too often children and parents experience dissatisfaction and disillusionment in the educational process. Parents can feel frustrated in their efforts to help their child succeed. How can parents help their child be successful and find joy in learning? Parents can help their children thrive in school, and in life, by having realistic expectations of their children’s abilities and by helping them to develop independent work habits.


Leslie was helping her eight-year-old son, Ben, study for his weekly spelling test. Ben was fidgety, jumping out of his chair, running to the refrigerator for a snack. His mind was on anything and everything but learning spelling words. Leslie was losing patience. After all, she had other things to do tonight and she still needed to fix dinner. If only she could get Ben to take this seriously.


Working successfully with a child on schoolwork requires understanding of the child’s developmental abilities. Leslie could have asked herself why Ben was reluctant to work with her to memorize the spelling words. Perhaps Leslie was asking Ben to spell words out loud rather than writing them down, which is a more effective method for most students.


Perhaps Leslie was expecting Ben to sit quietly in a chair for longer than was comfortable for him. It is very common for parents to expect a child to remain quiet and still during learning activities, but research has proven that brains function better when movement is part of the learning process. Most children need to move every fifteen minutes or so in order to concentrate. Making movement part of the activity is a great way to stimulate optimal learning and also interest and joy in learning.


If Leslie had decided to put movement into the activity and had also made an effort to capitalize upon Ben’s natural gift for wonder and fun, she could have presented the activity to Ben as a game. He would not only have been delighted to practice his spelling words, he would also have learned them more quickly and Leslie would have had a good time too. For example, Leslie could have left pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in various places around the room and each time Ben wrote the correct spelling of a word, he would have been allowed to get a piece of the puzzle. When all of the pieces were collected, he could put the puzzle together. The time he would spend putting together the puzzle would not only be his reward for correct spelling, it would be a rest break before the next learning activity.


Leslie could encourage Ben’s efforts to work independently. Frequently, in their desire to help their child achieve, parents set the bar too high, expecting more from their child than is reasonable under the circumstances. If expectations are unrealistic, students practice failure more than they practice success. They learn to avoid schoolwork rather than to relish their accomplishments. Leslie could have helped Ben to make a plan for how to learn the spelling words. The plan may have included writing each word five times while spelling it out loud as Ben walked around the room, mobilizing his whole brain for learning by incorporating movement into the activity. The next step in the plan could have been a test of the words while Ben balanced on one foot (strange as it sounds, research confirms that students pay better attention when engaging in balancing activities). And the plan could also have included a five to ten minute break (maybe to put together a puzzle) after completing the test.


Developing independent work habits allows a child to feel like a successful learner. The feeling of success encourages more focus and commitment. Parents can help their child most by clearly expressing confidence in their child’s ability to succeed. Children who are encouraged to believe in success are much more likely to persist when the going gets tough. They do not become discouraged by minor set backs. They understand the control they have in their educational experience.


One aspect of independent work habits is good time management skills. Helping children develop strong time management skills improves their grades and gives them the opportunity to spend more time with their family and friends. Leslie could monitor the amount of time Ben spends on each assignment. For example, Leslie could tell Ben that he has thirty minutes to practice spelling words, and if he gets at least 90 percent correct on the practice test, that he can use any time left from the thirty minutes for an activity of his choice.


Leslie could work more effectively with Ben by incorporating movement and fun into homework activities and by developing strategies and routines for homework management. When parents take a child’s proclivities into account in teaching independent work habits, the mood around the home is improved and parents as well as children have fun and feel the success and joy in schoolwork.

About the Author

Dr. Kari Miller is a Board Certified Educational Therapist and Director of Miller Educational Excellence in Los Angeles. She began her career almost twenty-five years ago as a special education resource teacher. She has worked with students in a vast array of capacities, including special education teacher and educational therapist. Dr. Miller has a PhD in Educational Psychology and Mathematical Statistics, a master’s degree in Learning Disabilities, Gifted Education and Educational Diagnosis, and a bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Education and Behavior Disorders.

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How To Improve Your Grammar And Punctuation (Part II)

By : kirakeivan

A typical example could be the reply to a negative question, such as ‘You have no underground railway in this town?’ The reply in
many African countries might well be: ‘Yes, we have none.’ During conversations, discussions and even negotiations with
people who live in Asian countries one will notice that they seldom say no. This is not, because there may not be an equivalent
word in their language but because they wish to save face or embarrassment for both parties. Instead they may use euphemism
or vague, neutral or indirect words and phrases rather than a direct or unforgiving — no.

It should also be noted that in many cultures people will tell you what they think you would want and like to hear, even by the way of giving you directions. They may use words such as ‘not far’, when the destination may well be a long way away. Often the answer to a language problem is the need to read ‘between the lines’. This indicates that one has to analyse what has not been said rather than what has been said.

In some languages such as German and most of the Scandinavian languages the information conveyed by the language is explicit and words have specific meaning, while in others such as Arabic and Japanese it is not necessarily so. There are sometimes hidden or subtle meanings in words and expressions which are not obvious to foreigners even if they have a good knowledge of a language. There is the story of a tired businessman telephoning the reception desk in a hotel in a country in the Middle East requesting ‘an extra pillow’, and to his surprise immediately being sent up a girl. If he made a similar request in a British hotel he might well be asked, whether he would like the pillow to be feather or foam filled.

There are basically two types of languages. There are the dead languages such as Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit which are learned for historical or religious reasons without being part of everyday linguist exchange and living languages currently in use worldwide. Because languages in current use are alive, they are the method of conveying new ideas, innovations and concepts. There is therefore a constant stream of new words which enter languages, as well as changes in the interpretation of existing words. This too can cause of misunderstandings, even when people talk the same language and even the use of identical words could mean different things.

Changes take place more rapidly in the context of the spoken language than when it is written. The compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, state that around 1,000 new words, worth recording, are added to the English language every year. Sign language is a central part of the deaf culture. There is no universal sign language and every country, with a few exceptions, has its own form of sign language, for example:

ASL — American Sign Language
LSF — Langue des Signes Francaise
DGS — German Sign Language
BSL — British Sign Language

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How To Improve Your Grammar And Punctuation (part I)

By : kirakeivan

Individual words too can have relatively different meanings in different cultures depending upon expectations, values and experience of the two persons, the speaker and the listener. For example a word such as ‘far’ when applied to distance, may convey something totally different to a city dweller in North America who practically never walks anywhere, compared with someone who lives on the land in the middle of an African country. Similarly words such as ‘big’ or ‘large’ when related to size of an object or a contract.

In the various languages, punctuation marks and other symbols such as the full stop (.), the comma (,) the colon (:), the semicolon (;), the question mark (?), the quotation mark (‘) and many others are not necessarily written in the same way, nor positioned in the same manner within text. Many different kinds of diacritical signs and marks are used, and some specialist signs and ligatures, such as the ampersand (&) or the ‘at’ sign (@) may not be understood.

All languages using romanised script are written from left to right on a horizontal line, while many others including Arabic script and languages in Asia and South East Asia are written from right to left. Chinese characters, pictographs or ideograms are printed from top to bottom in vertical columns shifting from right to left, but sometimes also from left to right in horizontal lines. There is a saying in diplomatic circles, that when a diplomat says yes, he means maybe; if he says maybe he means no; and if he says no, he is no diplomat. It is to oversimplify matters to state that
in Western European countries and in North America the word ‘yes’ means the affirmative and ‘no’ the negative, in many other countries and cultures even these two words are often the cause of serious misunderstandings. In France people will often say ‘no’, when they actually mean — maybe, but try and convince me. In most European languages the response to a question is ‘yes’ or ‘no’ according to whether the answer is positive or negative, as in the following examples:


Question Answer to be conveyed Answer

• Is your name Peter? (My name is Peter) Yes
• Is your name Peter? (My name is not Peter) No
• Isn’t your name Peter? (My name is Peter) Yes
• Isn’t your name Peter? (My name is not Peter) No

But in many African and other languages the choice of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is made in the light of whether the question and answer are both negative, when the answer is ‘yes’, but if they are not, it will be,’no’. The answers to the four questions above are therefore:

1. Affirmative question + affirmative answer = Yes
2. Affirmative question + negative answer = No
3. Negative question + affirmative answer = No
4. Negative question + negative answer = Yes

To be Continue .......

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