Teaching & Learning  

Responsibility for your child’s learning is shared between you and their school. You both play an important role in helping your child to understand the nature of their learning difficulty and in supporting them to grow and improve.

You can help to build your child’s confidence and motivation, as well as helping them to think about their learning difficulty in a positive way.

Your role

It's important to remember that you do not need to take on the role of your child’s teacher. You'll help your child most by being a supportive parent or guardian, do not make the living room into a classroom.

Things you can do include:

• let your child know that you are interested in what they are learning about at school and that you understand their difficulties
• support them while they complete homework and other tasks. It's important that this is a positive experience
• encourage them to read or write at home for fun
• access online tools and resources for learning difficulties.

There may be things you can do to help your child meet the goals. Continue to talk to your child's teacher about what you can do to support this or activities to help develop literacy and numeracy at home.

Learning at home

Time at home can be an opportunity to help your child practise what they have learned at school.

Things to keep in mind when your child is learning at home

Your child has different strengths and abilities that they bring to their learning. They may require greater support with some tasks than others.

Before starting any work with your child, explain clearly what they need to learn or do. For example, they may need to read a text and answer questions about what happened, write, do a maths task or work out how to read difficult words.

See what your child already knows or remembers about the task or the topic. This is the point at which you'll start supporting their learning.

Show them what to do. It's often easier for children to understand something when they have an example or can see a task being done first. 

Use a timer on a phone or tablet or the oven timer to schedule the amount of time to spend on specific tasks.

If you can see your child getting tired or anxious, consider taking a short break or giving them a choice about whether to keep going or come back to things later.

Always give your child positive feedback when they complete a task or are on the right track. Your child will build on these positive experiences and feelings and be more motivated to learn in future.

Ms McAlister