Start as You Mean to Go On: 5 Tips for Cultivating Focus and Concentration Skills for the Young Student
The path our children will choose once they are grown is unknown to us, and not all will find themselves going to a traditional college or university.
But what we do know is that different habits and strategies apply not just to academic success, but to success in all areas of life!
Student support comes in many forms!
So, how can you support your grade school child now with their study skills, balancing their time, and getting the most out of their learning experience?
For several years, I worked as a Learning Strategist at the Academic Success Centre at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. These centres exist at the majority of colleges, universities and polytechnic schools in North America and offer some permutation of academic support in writing, learning, exam taking, public speaking, and practice in communicating effectively with professors and peers alike. I was part of a team of staff that provided learning, writing and communication strategies to students, including how to study, exam taking strategies, time management, and focus and concentration.
From grade school to post secondary education, students face many of the same challenges with academic skill acquisition. Students were generally finding challenges in these common areas:
Focus and concentration (in-class, when studying, or taking tests).
Time management (in terms of studying, completing assignments, and fitting in “life” as well!)
Maintaining motivation to stay engaged with coursework.
Learning and applying study and test taking strategies.
Let’s take a look at what we can be doing now with our seven to fourteen year old children to create a smooth transition to learning in high school and beyond. (And for even MORE ways to support your child in their learning journey, click here!)
Keep in mind that many university grads say that they wish they’d understood sooner that there is no one right way to be a successful student. Learning takes on many shapes and forms!
You may be asking yourself, where do I focus my efforts first? I suggest giving attention to focus and concentration, since without this, there is no learning!
Let’s get started!
Tip One: Sleep and exercise
What methods can you try to cultivate balance in your young child’s routine?
As the Friendly Giant* would say, “Look up, way up,” or in our case I invite you to zoom out, way out to our basic physiological needs of sleep and exercise. These two things alone go a long way to making focus and concentration possible. As you might imagine, sleep and exercise often get tossed aside by well meaning, “serious” students in college and university. Determine what is the right amount of sleep and exercise for your child, and then realizing it will need to be adjusted as they grow is the first step. Our seven to twelve year olds generally need 9-10 hours and our teens may need up to 11 hours! We can use exercise strategically, perhaps right before and after a learning activity that will involve staying relatively still. Sleep and exercise can greatly improve focus and concentration for our kids and for us too!
Tip Two: Schedule lessons in small chunks
As anyone working with children knows, we need to keep the time on activities relatively short in order to maintain focus. Of course, the time our children can spend on tasks increases as they get older, but the key here is to meet them where they are, right now. So if your child can focus on their learning tasks for about 15 minutes, then set up a schedule with 15 minute blocks of learning sandwiched between blocks of:
Exercise
or snacks
or gardening
or a different learning task
or artistic activities
This may mean splitting up a full lesson into several, smaller 15 minute chunks. Better to stop the activity before you know your child will start drifting off to make better use of everyone's time!
Tip Three: Create a distraction free environment
Taking time to create a learning space that is free from distractions will also go a long way to promoting focus and concentration (As I’m writing this I can hear my family arguing in the kitchen about who will do the dishes….sigh).
For instance, we can fight the urge to cover our walls with too much visual information. We might also tell our kids what distracts us when we are trying to work and what we do to minimize those distractions, and create a dialogue between parent and child; we are not all distracted by the same things and it’s helpful for children to realize this!
You can help your kid determine their top 3 distractors and possible solutions, e.g:
Minimizing distractions will help your child find more concentration.
Designate a specific place for devices to go when other learning is happening
Noise from other family members, especially now that more of us are at home might be dealt with by wearing headphones (got them on right now!)
Other unrelated thoughts popping into our minds can be placed in a “parking lot” aka a piece of scrap paper to be dealt with later.
The key here is to have your child come up with the solutions as much as possible and to revisit their effectiveness from time to time.
Tip Four: Preparing for learning activities
Another way to help children with their focus and concentration during learning activities, lessons, classes, etc. is to do what in my work we called “Pre-lecture prep”. Think, “Look at the map before you start to drive”. Sounds obvious, right? Why then do a lot of us, (me included), neglect or rush through this step? We can model this for our kids by verbalizing our own preparation for activities, for example:
Okay, I need to get out the art supplies and re-read the lesson description. So first we are….and then we will...Oh, and I need to set up the space we will work in too. Right, and last time I didn’t give us enough time so I need to check that we have at least an hour, so we have time to clean up at the end.
This strategy is especially effective for older children who are learning to be more self-directed and motivated! Allowing your child to see the “journey” they are about to embark on, including the steps and time needed, helps them to better stay on track and not get “lost”. You might even want to draw the plan out on paper so you can both refer to it during the activity. Over time you can have your child join you in this pre-activity prep. “Hey, did I remember everything?”. They will love to try and think of anything you might have forgotten!
Tip Five: Retrieving what we know
Reviewing an activity, your day, or an experience is always worth the time!
After doing your pre-activity prep, a fun way to tie today’s lesson into previous lessons and knowledge is to do what we referred to at work as a Mind Dump. Have your child write or draw out everything they can remember learning from the last lesson and/or things they already know about today’s topic. This will not only help with their focus and concentration but will also build confidence, interest and aid with memory storage of the new content they are about to learn.
(In Waldorf education, this is known as the “Review” portion of the main lesson, which Steiner indicated is perhaps the most important activity for children to engage in! Reviewing what one has learned thus far builds connections, and allows children to process information that they have taken into their sleep from the day before in profound ways! However you do it, this activity will be a great asset in your child’s learning.)
As we consider our children’s future, it’s easy to get overwhelmed- how can we support, guide, and motivate them to find their right path, whatever that may be?
This question is even more intensely highlighted by the switch to virtual learning, and the great upheaval that many children have experienced with their usual school and daily schedule.
The effects of good sleep, doable activities, eliminating distractions, thorough preparation, and purposeful review are huge; so much so, that they are still given as tips for students studying at university.
We’re all about simple and meaningful, so start small. What’s one thing that resonates with you as an easy strategy to incorporate into your routine? Build from there- once your first piece feels easy, add another in!
A little more balance in a child’s academic day goes a long way into improving concentration and focus, and therefore, better learning!
References
-Brown, Roediger III and McDaniel (2014). Make it Stick: the Science of Successful Learning, Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
-child-development-theories-2795068
-The Friendly Giant, The_Friendly_Giant
About the Author
Susan is co-raising two children who are now 13 and 17 and attending school remotely, for the time being at least, at a public junior and senior highschool in Edmonton, Canada. Previously she taught families with babies through preschoolers in classes that incorporated music, movement and sign language.
A long, long time ago she taught adult literacy at a program mostly attended by english speaking newcomers who did not get the chance in their country of origin for much schooling due to socioeconomic or war related reasons. This program also served students educated in Canada who none-the-less continued to struggle with reading and writing.
She holds a BA (honours) Psychology and a Masters of Education from Western University, London, Ontario, Canada.