Persistence

One Easy Trick to Improve Your Grades

I’m sure you’ve heard all the noise in the news about the importance of sleep. Maybe your parents have steaked some scientific study under your nose. I’m also sure you're doing your best to ignore all this. I’m going to try to change your mind.

Here’s a fact you might not have heard. Students who don't get enough sleep are often unable to remember what they learned the day before. There’s a simple reason for this. While we sleep, information we picked up that day is moved from our short term memory to our long term memory. Without enough sleep, it goes into the recycle bin. You know what that means. It’s thrown out with the trash.

One of my best students started to miss class. She wasn’t ditching. She was ill. She hadn’t been sick much the year before, so I became concerned. Her grades were suffering, but I was most alarmed because she looked terrible. I asked if she'd seen a doctor. She had not. Then she told me she was only getting about three hours of sleep each night. She stayed up to study. 

I explained there’s a time limit each day, and studying past that time has diminishing returns. It would be far better to sleep nine hours, than to sleep less and study more. Since her grades had fallen from A’s to C’s, she agreed to try my suggestion. Two weeks later she felt fine, looked great, and her grades improved steadily.

Suggestion: Count backwards nine hours from when you need to get up. Make that your bedtime. Use a clock like this one, CLICK HERE (ad). You’ll feel better, and your grades will improve too. 

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Photo Credit: Pixabay

Growth in Children

Improving Behavior

Make Grammar Easier, Make it Visual

Grammar is easier for students to grasp and remember if you make it visual for them. It’s even easier if they make something visual themselves. It’s hard to forget a rule if you have interacted with it, or see it every day.

I made it super simple for students to remember the Question Words in German and French by having each student make a depiction of the word. I showed them an example on the board; they went home and made their own on regular notebook paper.

Some students, however, went above and beyond the assignment. They used their computers or/or drew something stunning. This made the next step simple. Each row picked the image they liked the best for each question word. Then we voted as a class.

This procedure was repeated in all my first year classes until we had the best of the best for a final vote. I took the winners to a copy center, made color copies and laminated them. We displayed the posters on the wall for the remainder of the school year. The students, however, put up the ones they made in their bedrooms.

These visual representations of question words made them come alive. We never translated the words into English, but students knew what they meant and how to use them. You can adapt this assignment to other items that are difficult for students to either grasp or remember. It works, and it’s fun. 

You are reading from the blog: http://www.roadtofreecollege.com

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Wallace

The Definition of Excellence

Setting Priorities is Wise