Sometimes our children have problems in the classroom because methods and materials have not been adapted to meet them exactly where they are in their learning. However, there is hope. It is helpful to remember a few key things before beginning the journey towards working with children who struggle in the classroom.

1. Learning can be challenging for anyone, adults included. Reflect on a situation when it seemed to have taken forever and a day for you to understand a particular concept. It can be very frustrating. Some challenges to learning include being sleepy, bored, hungry, having a learning disability, needing more time to digest the information, or needing it taught differently. Oftentimes, teaching something differently, can effectively address the former issues.

2. Get to know your students. It is worth the investment to know what they like and are interested in knowing. When you get to know your students, you may discover that you begin to teach a concept differently than you normally would because you know what captures your students’ imagination. Then, it becomes easier to teach in a more cross-curricular way. For example, you may be able to find some theme of interest in social studies, that may lend itself well to their science and even math lesson.

I tutored a student who absolutely loved horses. She had visited stables and ridden horses on numerous occasions. Often, I would integrate stories, writing assignments, and conversation about horses into our late evening tutoring sessions to keep her focused. I would even ask her questions about horses. (I actually learned a few things!) This would really get her talking and motivated. Once you have tapped into that, the trick is to get them to divert all of that energy and excitement into the assignment/skill that they need to be working on! That’s why it is good if you can have assignments set up that mirror their interests. When children are interested, they really do pay attention better and for longer.

3. Make it fun for you, too! If you are miserable helping your child or students with their work, then chances are pretty good that your discontent will show through. Then, they will be more miserable than they were before you even started because they, too, may have started out not wanting to be bothered just as you did!

You may find it helpful to simply close the text book and put away the paper, and use a whiteboard that you can get from the dollar store and some markers, to show a concept. The big idea is to help them to move away from the mundane so that they can get excited about the work in front of them. Capture their imagination through your own creativity.

Let’s say you like to write.. like me. Then write up some sentences on sentence strips. Next, cut out the words. Then have your student assemble the cut-up sentences. Make sure that you keep paper clips or something that will keep your sentence pieces together. You need the words that make up one sentence to not get mixed up with the words that make up another sentence, unless you have some type of identifier on the back of the word pieces like a color code or numbers which identifies the sentence to which it belongs.

This activity is great if your child is working on their reading skills and learning about sentence/story structure. You can really amp up this activity if the sentences that you designed for them to assemble actually builds into a short story. All you need is about 8-10 sentences to make this activity come alive. EVERY student whom I have worked with has enjoyed this activity. I think it must make them feel like a junior detective or something. They LOVE it and if they’re working with a partner, it’s like they want to see who can be the first to assemble the most sentences and figure out how the story should go.

THEN, if you want to make this work for a large group of children, you can do that too! Let’s say you are in a classroom or a home-school group, you can break the students out into teams of 2-4. (Make sure that you have enough of these sentence strips prepared for the entire group.) Then, watch it become a competition between the groups to see who can build their sentences from the cut-up pieces, and then assemble the sentences to build the story, the quickest. Not only are they reading and working on sentence and story structure, they are also using their critical thinking skills to accomplish this, as well as cooperation and collaboration skills. They will hardly feel like they are working. It’s definitely a winner! This is one of those activities where the process is its own reward!

Finally, as you are working with your student, remember that if the work in front of them is relevant, where they can see a connection to it in their experiences and everyday life, then it becomes relatable. If it’s relatable, then it becomes easier for them to understand.