SIX COOL TOOLS FOR HOMEWORK-STRUGGLERS
In previous blogs, we’ve discussed how tips from baseball coaches can help parents get their homework-failing kids become better organized and better able to tackle those dreaded after-school assignments. This final blog will provide the six tools that should prove particularly useful to kids who aim to turn from “homework failures” to “homework champs.”
First, the Five W’s. This is the technique made famous by journalists who are taught to use the ‘five W’s' when writing their news stories. The “w’s,” of course, are ”who, what, where, when and why” and the answers to those questions , budding reporters are told, absolutely have to appear in the very first paragraph of any news stories they write.
How does the system work for the budding student? Well. when he’s reading that long, scary encyclopedia article, for instance, he has to concentrate on writing in his notebook only the answers to these questions and nothing else. That means he might come out with something like this:
WHO–President Harry S. Truman WHAT–sent US troops WHERE–to Korea WHEN–June 1950 WHY–because North Korea was invading South Korea and we were trying to help the South Koreans.
Of course, any article or chapter usually contains a number of paragraphs that may need to be reduced to the Five W’s (and sometimes the writer has to add ‘HOW’ to the list of questions. ) But in the end, the writer not only has to think hard to do it right but winds up with only a few short “five W’s” he has to remember for test time.
Then there’s the CHRONOLOGY. This tool–which basically means a list of dates arranged in order on a particular subject–tends to work better when the homework involves writing about a person’s life. If, for instance, the student needs to learn as much as possible about Eisenhower, he can divide a page into two columns–a narrow one for the important dates and a wide column for the important facts. His homework for that day, then, would wind up looking like this:
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER–1890–born in Texas; 1915–graduated from West Point; First World Was–was an instructor in the tank corp; 1922-1941–stationed in the Panama Canal Zone, served as asst. exec. to the asst. Secretary of War, and was in the Philippines; June 1942–named US commander of European Theatre of Operations; Nov. 1942–commanded Americans in North African landings. And so, with just as many dates as the writer thinks are the most important events in Eisenhower’s life. The important thing to stress is that the writer must use as few words as possible. One or two sentences next to each date are usually enough. (And it doesn’t hurt ot put a star next to the dates the teacher seems to consider most important.)
These two methods of taking notes as concisely as possible, should cover almost any topic. But there’s no reason a student can’t become creative and come up with a method he considers more fun. One possibility:
The comic strip. The artistic student can turn out actual cartoon characters, but others can use the good old reliable round-head-on-sticks characters. What’s important are the ‘balloons” that represent the character’s speech. If the cartoon family is discussing Seward’s Folly, for instance, one character might be saying, “You want to buy Alaska from Russia, Mr. Seward? That’s ridiculous.” The second character explains, through his balloon, why he fully agrees that the idea of buying Alaska is a bad idea. But, happily, Mr. Seward himself retorts that the idea makes sense–and puts forth his reasons in the very few words that can be squeezed inside a small circle. After finishing his ‘comic strip’ the student will probably never forget just why Mr. Seward purchased Alaska from Russia–and may have enjoyed doing homework for the first time in his life. (The creative approach might even help math-phobic types, like me, remember what the heck logarithms are all about.) But two other valuable tools are also available to most students.
Let’s not forget the ‘search engines’ like Google, for example. If your kid hasn’t yet learned to put ‘keywords’ into the right box, don’t forget to tell him. The internet, in fact, is an important source of information to kids as well as adults. And here’s probably the best source of help of all:
www.NYPL. org. The New York Public Library has a website that probably provides more help to school-children than any other library system. (But if your state’s library system has a website, by all means check it out as well.) On this Library’s home page, however, the struggling student will find a truly impressive number of useful links. For younger kids, there’s On-Lion for Kids that provides answers to questions about homework, history, people and places, plus, naturally, lists of good books they might want to read. Teen Link also provides homework help as well as links to hotlines, booklists, college and financial aid information, sports, and special online activities for teens.
1915–graduated from West Point-
tthis particular blog will pinpoint the six tricks that can help your kid start acing the afterschool assignments he’s been failing all term.
Tags: Children, Education, School, teaching kids study skills
