How to Plan School Holidays For Students to Get Ahead
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Oftentimes when we think of school holidays, we can get easily confused on how we should spend them. Should we just fill it with leisure activities or should we study hard to get ahead for the school term? Regardless of your opinion, it depends on your goal.
School holidays in Australia is quite generous. Every ten or so weeks of school, there is a 2 week period where you do not attend school at all. Combined with the recent lockdowns in NSW because of COVID, this means children are spending more and more time at home. Traditionally, they are given the choice of hanging out with their friends, going to the park, doing school holiday classes, family reunions and the list goes on. In order to know how a student can best use their time during the holiday, it depends on their goal.
If their goal is to not fall behind because they are extremely weak in a particular subject, then one of the educational goals can be to focus on that area. Whereas if they worked really hard and just completed a long period of consistent study as well as the NSW selective exam, then recreation can be a bigger focus. I am going to use one of my perceived goals from a student I teach. A parent recently came up to me and told me they were unsure on how they should best spend the holiday to make sure that their child spends it constructively yet have a fine balance of fun as they were still quite young. Based on this goal and situation, I will detail a plan that can be tailored from my perspective as an educator.
1. Have a timetable
If you don’t have a timetable, hours will fly by and you won’t even notice. This does not have to be complete to the dot but there need to be times in the day set for activities. The easiest way to ‘waste’ your school holidays is to sleep in every day, have an undefined purpose or goal for what to achieve and just relax while watching television or the computer. This might be acceptable for a day or at most two but any longer and it can really waste valuable time you won’t be getting back. Therefore, I recommend implementing a timetable and to plan out activities prior to the holidays. If you plan when it has already begun, you won’t be able to execute with purpose with your child on what to achieve and chances are your lack of confidence will be an opportunity for children to push back for more recreation. Psst, I learnt this the hard way.
2. Include leisure activities
I touched on this point before but let’s be real. It is the holiday and there need to be days for children to unwind. Education is important don’t get me wrong but there need to be days for them to reset and look at the bigger picture of what is important in life. Sometimes we don’t want to be caught up in all the commotion and forget the fact that they are young and the time they have as children can be quite fleeting. Go to the park as a family, do the things that you wished you did as a child even if it is just for a single day out of two weeks in the holiday. On this note as well, including a leisure activity that is significant and something you do not do often. If parents can get time off work, why not spend the day creating a custom costume with their child? Or attend Luna Park with your family during the day (post covid). Every school holiday should have one memorable activity that is done so that the student if they were asked what they did in the school holiday, they can unapologetically share it. Imagine if they were the only child in their friend group who did ‘nothing’ at home, that can have a negative effect on their confidence and mental state.
3. Don’t forget about study
Going back to this educational goal. They don’t want to ‘fall behind’ so students should study. It should be a set amount of time basically every day except that significant leisure activity day. For small stuff like riding a bike around the block or just chilling at home, still study those days. A typical split can be an hour and a half in the morning on a topic you are particularly weak in and an hour later in the day (potentially before dinner) on a topic they are already pretty good in. This evening session is more of a revision, so they don’t forget the fundamentals while the morning allows them to use their energy from the time they wake up to concentrate on a new task and to learn new information. Mix and match these hours to suit your needs and if they can only do an hour of study a day, that is better than nothing at all. A little bit goes a long way, you just need to be consistent with it as then you will see results after the school holidays.
4. Change up your education materials and approach
During school, as it is a group class the assessments are standardised. This means it caters to the majority and it may not be optimal for students at the end of the spectrum such as those who find classwork easy or difficult. If you find yourself in this situation, try to provide yourself with real challenges. This will differ depending on the student, but they need to put in the effort to achieve an outcome. Provide some variety as well. Don’t always give the same worksheets back-to-back in the workbook. Instead, try to integrate different pages from different sources, create custom questions and maybe get questions online or have your tutor try something new. The key part is to change it up, give it a go and change it accordingly. Not everything will work for every student. For instance, I have a student that I teach that hates learning from a textbook, so I tried taking questions out and presenting them in a more fun way. Or if a student usually always learns by seeing other people, do it first before they try it themselves, maybe they can be the first one to attempt a new concept using their existing prior knowledge. The possibilities are endless.
In conclusion, I’ve gone over a couple of different strategies that can be used to ensure that students are best allocating their time in the holidays. This is especially important during study or work from home situations where you are not really in holiday mode but you are still staying at home. It is important to have a good balance between study and leisure so we can reach our individual educational goals whatever it may be.
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