Ways to Groom Your Average Child into An A-list Student This New Term (Part 1)

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Bamidele Wale-Oshinowo

There is no single recipe for grooming an A-list student but research has shown that a high level of parental involvement with plenty of love and devotion would gradually turn an average child into a quite intelligent one. Intelligence in children is 49% genetics and 51% stimulation by their environment (environment here is equated to parental involvement). Here are some tips guaranteed to work like magic.

1) Reduce Television Time: Studies have shown that TV impairs cognitive skills and also wastes crucial brain-development time. Consequently, to improve the cognitive skills of your growing child (5 – 10 years) and teenagers, TV time must be reduced to the barest minimum, even during school holidays.

2) Eliminate Video and Computer Games: Eliminate major sources of distraction. One of these are video games, phone and computer games. A study reported in the Australian Journal of Educational Technology reported that “students who spend more than two hours a day playing computer and video games score 9.4% lower in school exams than students who do not play such games.”

3) Talk, Talk & Talk: Replace TV time with more conversations with your child. Discuss everything from your job, politics, economy to the books you are currently reading. Don’t worry whether or not they understand some of the big words you have to use in the process. This is because your child would figure out the meaning of such words by asking you or looking them up in the dictionary later.

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4) Open-Ended Questions: To encourage critical thinking skills in your child, it is advisable to ask more of open-ended questions and reduce the ‘yes-no questions’. Open-ended questions such as ‘why should we visit grandma tomorrow and not today?’ would make a child reflect on each question by drawing on his knowledge bank before responding. This will be useful in school work.

5) Reading: Reading is the foundation of all learning. Reading both fiction and non-fiction books from an early age helps a child’s brain make connections with his or her surroundings. How? Reading stimulates a child’s brain to build background knowledge about the world by helping it absorb and apply content from all areas, including science and maths. It is therefore important for parents to be involved by teaching and modeling good reading skills to their children from an early age. Encourage them to read wide, and set aside private and family reading time.

6) Encourage Curiosity: It is important to keep your children’s excitement up at learning about new things. Rather than shutting out unintelligent questions, answer them with enthusiasm but guide these questions to points or areas that would ultimately provide learning.