Study help

This year, my son entered the world of final exams. Last week, he brought home huge study guides for three of his classes. He had never seen so much homework in his life.

He survived last week and is looking forward to taking his exams and enjoying the winter break. Tonight, a parent of a student in his Texas history class sent the other parents a link to an amazing web site called Quizlet (http://quizlet.com). Some young 15-year-old genius created the site a few years ago while he was studying for a French quiz. There had to be a better way, he thought, and Quizlet was born.

Quizlet allows you, or preferably the student, to create flash cards and sample tests. In my son's case, his history study guide include more than 100 questions and his friend's parent entered the questions into Quizlet and an electronic study guide was created.

Quizlet's founder is now a student at MIT and the site boasts hundreds of millions of scores logged. You can follow Quizlet on Twitter, connect on Facebook or read their blog (quizlet.com/blog).

It will be interesting to see if the electronic tools hold my son's attention longer than his multi-page, handwritten efforts. Check back and I'll let you know how it goes!

Back to School!

I have to admit, I am not one of those moms who get weepy when the kids go back to school. I'm quite the opposite and have to restrain myself so the kids don't pick up on how happy I am to escort them out the door on that first day back to school each year.

We're looking forward to a good school year this year. My son is in his fourth year (7th grade) at a private school for kids with learning differences and my daughter is starting her second year (4th grade) at the neighborhood public school. Both kids were happy to be going back to school this week and they quickly fell into the normal routine of early bedtimes and even earlier wake up times.

One of the things we've learned from my son's school is the importance of helping kids get organized with their school work. After four years, my son expects his binder for school to be set up a certain way and this year, we set up my daughter's binder in much the same way. Her papers last year took on a life of their own and became nearly impossible to manage. She didn't have a binder and neither of us knew what was finished, what had been turned in and what was to be left at home. 

There's nothing fancy about the organization of the binder. There's a daily assignment planner in the front and an additional monthly calendar for long term assignments. Next there are two  pockets — one for "to do" items (homework or other unfinished assignments) and one for "finished" assignment (items ready to be turned in). In my daughter's binder, we added a third pocket for "leave at home" so that the papers she no longer needs are not mixed in with the assignments that need to be done or turned in. 

My son's school sends all of his "leave at home" papers in an envelope on Thursday. I love that! He and I can go through the week's work together and there are no extra papers cluttering his binder. Actually, there are plenty of extra papers with drawings of bizarre contraptions on them but a binder can't solve every problem! 

There are also dividers for every subject which rarely get used in my son's binder. I think the intent is for him to store papers by subject that he might use for studying. 

We're stumbling through our first week and it's already obvious that my son will have to step up his efforts this year. We're hoping to transition as much work as possible to the computer this year and he's going to be learning more about how to ask for the kind of help he needs (self-advocating). Each week, his class rotates between classes for life skills, study skills, speech, computer and art.  Did I mention that I love his school?