Regardless of how old the child is, most parents have to face a very headache problem - the child's rubbing. This point has also been hailed as "poking at the deepest pain point of many Chinese parents". The little ones have no sense of time, and they start to rub from the moment they get up and get dressed; not to mention the older children, who have never had a hard time writing homework, and are always procrastinating.
We always complain that our children are procrastinating and don't schedule time, but have you taught your children how to manage their time?
In fact, time management, like everything, requires methods to practice, and it is difficult for children to speak naturally.
Two days ago, I saw a good article on the Internet, introducing some of the methods that American school teachers teach children about time management by age group, and gave guidelines for how parents can use similar methods at home.
Time management skills for preschoolers
For 3- and 4-year-olds, time is basically divided into "now" and "non-now". But it's enough to help them figure out how to predict and plan for the next step. Come up today and talk to you about dry goods! To enhance this knowledge, we can do this:
Talk about the changing seasons
Now that the temperature is gradually warming up, the seasons are the main tool for introducing children to the periodicity of time. It's a very abstract concept, and preschoolers are figurative thinking animals. But by looking at the trees in season, children can concretely see the process of change: the green leaves in the summer turn red, then brown, and finally fall off the trees and then come back to life in the spring. This is a tangible representation of the passage of time that children can understand.
How does this help time management? By observing the laws of nature and daily life, children can intuitively grasp the concept of time and learn to sort. Helping your child understand time cycles in your family can have your child sort family photos by season, or point out changes in nature while walking.
I remember when my daughter was young, we would pick up some flowers and leaves every season, sandwich them in the book in order, and every time she went to the book, she would relive the changes in the plants in each season, which felt familiar and interesting.
Create a (picture) timesheet
In the preschool world, teachers use pictures to represent time and teach children to recognize timetables. For example, use apples to represent snack time, and books to represent story time. In the preschool classroom, there will be a variety of visual images to help children understand the trajectory of their kindergarten day.
So while these 3- and 4-year-olds can't tell you exactly when they're snacking, they know it's after circle time, and before they go to the bathroom. This gives them a comfortable sense of order and predictability.
Since young children love regular and repetitive activities, you can take them at home to make a chart of the morning and bedtime program, and then have your child tick the chart for each program completed. This is really the process of teaching them how to break down larger tasks into smaller, more manageable steps.
I once bought Isabelle a bonus board with a lot of magnet quest blocks (picture + text on it). Horizontally on the board is the week, and vertical is the daily task. Every day, after completing a task, she would paste a small magnet star in the corresponding grid. At first, the tasks were randomly arranged, but then I tried to make her reorder them in the order in which she did everything, and she gradually knew what she had to do each day. Now this reward board is a bit naïve for the 7-year-old sister, and it can be used on the 2-year-old brother immediately, which is a very practical tool.
Help your child practice waiting
Time management is fundamentally the ability to delay gratification, a skill that helps children develop good study habits, achieve better grades, and otherwise have great benefits.
To strengthen time management, we need to design situations where children wait for what they want. For example, if they particularly want to go to the movies, we schedule it for a week instead of going right the next day. We can also mark the time of their holidays on the calendar, which makes them not only not disgusted with postponing certain things, but instead gain a sense of excitement of positive anticipation.
You can start with events like outings and birthday parties: for example, start talking about your trip to the zoo a few days in advance, or have your child keep a birthday wish list. Even planting a bud, watering it, and watching it slowly blossom can teach children the art of patience.
Christmas is the most exciting time for Isabelle, and for that day to come, we plan together what we need to do, such as when to buy Christmas decorations, when to decorate Christmas trees, when to write cards, buy gifts, and so on. The most interesting thing is that because she believes in Santa Claus's existence, I will ask her to write to Santa from the beginning of the year to write down what she wants. Even after waiting for a year, Santa Claus only gave her a small gift, and she was very happy.
Preschool to Second Grade children
By the time children move up to these lower grades, they are already learning to read the calendar and clock. These are the basics they use to adhere to the schedule. To enhance this skill, we can do this:
Find a home for all your belongings
If they can't find a pencil, children won't be able to do their homework. Therefore, the cultivation of children's organizational skills must precede time management. In order to motivate students at school, the teacher may create a fictional fairy who will "find" those neat and orderly desks and leave them with a note, a prize or a piece of candy.
Teachers also set clear routines, such as putting unfinished homework in the "Keep Here" folder and homework in the "Take Home" folder.
What can we do at home? To encourage your child to keep their school bag stationery (or room) organized, you can also invent your own fictional characters and secretly give them some surprise rewards when your child is doing well.
Plus, a weekly checklist that's easy to spot (e.g., "Did homework fit in your backpack?"). Signed the reading log? Etc.) can also help your child check that they are already in order for their own things.
For the return of items, I have failed in my daughter's work, and I have not strictly required her, resulting in her often losing everything and being careless. Many people may think that the ability to organize has nothing to do with time management, but on the contrary, the ability to organize items and organize schedules is actually a common ability. A child with a sense of order can know both the object and the time.
Use the visual timer
To help first-graders understand how much time is left to complete the task, the teacher places a pie-like visual timer on her smart display. For example, when she sets it to 15 minutes, a quarter of the "pie" turns green. As the seconds go by, the slices become smaller and smaller, and with only five minutes left, the slices turn red. Seeing time slip away figuratively can help kids find their own rhythm.
As a parent, you can also use the visual timer at home. Some apps, such as Children's Countdown (for younger kids) and Time Timer, are great to use. Vintage eggs and hourglass timers worked just as well. These tools are available to your child when writing homework.
If you have a second-grader in your family, set the timer to 20 or 25 minutes. If the child completes it before the timer beeps, a star is awarded each night, and after a week of accumulation, it is cashed into a corresponding specific reward according to the performance of the week, such as going for a walk in the park together.
The goal is to help children complete tasks more efficiently while deepening their understanding of how the clock works.
In previous articles, I have talked about one of the most difficult types of questions to prepare for the exam is the time problem in mathematics. Because there are two ways of expressing time in English, which are very complicated, adults may not be able to say it immediately. But through the preparation of the exam, I have more deeply realized the benefits of recognizing the clock for children. Among other things, Isabelle's concept of time length is much more accurate because she learns to recognize the clock, which helps her time management a lot. I used a very interesting app called Jungle Time to help her learn to recognize clocks:
Be clear about the consequences of everything
Children can and should be responsible for their tasks, and when they drop the chain, they need to have a hunch about the possible consequences. Sometimes, these consequences are natural (for example, if you don't learn spelled words, you may get a low score on an exam), while other times, adults should be clear and tell them about the consequences.
Every Friday, the teacher might set a "pick time" where students can choose what they want to play, from board games to Lego toys to computers. Kids are very much looking forward to "choosing a time," but the classroom rule is that they can only participate in "choose a time" if they have completed all the assignments in the classwork folder. The benefit of this is that children know that they will get good results when they try to learn and use their time wisely, and lose them when they don't.
If the child does not complete the homework for his own reasons, instead of replacing the child to find a reason to explain the reason for not writing homework with the teacher, parents should restrain their impulse and let the child bear the corresponding consequences. If the child takes the initiative to explain to the teacher what is wrong and expresses the determination to improve, we should also praise them, so that the child's sense of responsibility and consequences will be stronger.
We also have a bonus time at home called "Movie Night", and if Isabelle performs well each week, she can choose a movie you like to watch; if you don't perform well, the reward is canceled and replaced with another mission. Because of this reward and punishment system, children are very active every week.
Children in grades 3 to 6
Homework and extracurricular activities increase at this age, so it's especially important for children to learn how to set goals, prioritize, organize, and think flexibly. Your goal is for your child to manage his time more purposefully, with less complaints and procrastination. How to do this:
Estimated time
In order to develop a realistic schedule, children need to have some idea of how long things will take.
To teach this vital skill, teachers may ask students to spend a few minutes at the end of the day planning their after-school time. The students were each given a chart dividing the afternoon and evening time into a 15-minute interval. Each period is followed by three columns: what the children intend to do, what they actually do, and reflection.
The reflective part is essential because constantly re-evaluating the progress of things helps children adjust their schedules accordingly: for example, the last time I went to a soccer game at 5 p.m., it was difficult to concentrate on homework after that. This time, I'll finish the hardest homework before practicing soccer.
If your child's teacher doesn't do this, you can also do it yourself at home. Make a chart and have your child fill out the first column themselves and then fill in the next two columns together. Discuss which are going according to plan and how problems can be solved.
Recently, my child offered to make a schedule, so the two of us spent an evening discussing all of her extracurricular activities throughout the day, including morning and evening schedules, and arranged a weekly schedule in half an hour interval. She told me herself that she couldn't remember what she was going to do, and she had to wait for me to tell her, and now that she had this watch, she could easily know what she needed to do. I agreed with her to try it out for a week, and if it proves that there is something unreasonable about the schedule, we will adjust it next week. In the process, I also taught her how to use Excel to make charts, which can be said to kill two birds with one stone.
Plan long-term tasks
Deciding when to do math homework tonight is one thing, figuring out how and when to complete a diorama of a book report that you'll need to turn in three weeks later is another.
The key to long-term project planning is to break it down into smaller steps. For example, reading or buying materials requires breaking down these tasks into subdivided tasks that need to be completed every night, such as reading one to three chapters per night.
Suggest that your child post some post-it notes on their calendars and write down tasks. This way, if you need to take longer than expected, the sticky note can be easily moved to another day.
Your child can also plan the steps required to complete the project by starting backwards from the due date. You can discuss the whole process with them so that the work is less of a headache: they may take 1 day to buy materials and another 3 days to make a stereoscopic model. This leaves 10 days for reading. If a book is 150 pages, you need to read 15 pages a day.
Isabelle brings back a big assignment from school every Friday (usually a poster or PPT) that needs to be turned in on Mondays. In order not to let her pile up her homework until Sunday night to complete it by surprise, we usually discuss what the homework needs to do together on Friday night, break down the corresponding tasks, and then let her decide for herself which spare time on the weekend to complete the big homework step by step. I initially monitored her progress, but now that I've found out that she's planning well, I'm basically letting go.
Prioritize
Learning to distinguish between "what must be done" and "want to do", and learning to prioritize and self-monitor, is crucial for children.
To help the class do this, the teacher used analogies of rocks, pebbles, and water. Rocks and pebbles represent students' duties, rocks represent their most important tasks (such as going to school, homework, and sleeping), pebbles represent their extracurricular activities, and water is "want to do," such as playing computer games and partying with friends.
The teacher uses a jar to represent the day. Put rocks first, because they are something that must be done whether you like it or not. Next up are the pebbles. But there was still some space in the jar, so we poured water until the jar (i.e. the day) was full.
Parents can also imitate this practice and make such a jar at home. You can talk to your child about their goals, priorities, and things they love. If you find a bit of an imbalance, don't be afraid to adjust. After a conversation, you may decide together that your child should reduce some of the cobblestones that fill the crevices of the rocks (extracurricular activities) and add some relaxing water (leisure time).
For this, we have a deep understanding of this semester when our daughter entered the third grade. Overall, it feels that the child is too busy to even sleep enough time, because she chooses a lot of extracurricular activities herself, and she is not willing to give up. I consulted with her for a long time while planning activities for the next semester, and finally persuaded her to abandon a club and make the schedule mentioned earlier, improving the efficiency of time use, and now we both feel much more at ease.
Time management is a college question, we adults often do not do well, let alone children. Nevertheless, it is necessary to do our best to help them master the skills of time management, because this is an important ability that will benefit them for a lifetime.
In addition to cultivating children's time management skills in the methods mentioned in the article, we ourselves should also lead by example to show children the image of a good time manager, rather than being strict with others and being lenient with ourselves. Classes are coming, and it is important to help children quickly grasp the magic tricks of time management!
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