How to help your child make full use of their remedial lessons

Many parents despair when they hear that their child has to go for remedial lessons. They see it as a sign of failure, and may even have feelings of shame that their child is not keeping up in their classes.

However, rather than seeing remedial lessons as a failure of your parenting, you can choose to see things in a positive light. Your child’s teacher wants the best for them, and this is an opportunity for your child to be brought up to speed on what they should know for their studies.

What are remedial lessons all about?

Remedial programmes are meant to enable the teacher and student to work together to close any learning gaps that the student is experiencing, i.e., what your child is expected to know, as compared to what your child currently knows. Whatever core concepts, key knowledge, and core skills that your child may be lacking will be looked over, to be addressed during the remedial lessons.

For your child to make the most out of their remedial lessons, your child must be prepared mentally to grasp this opportunity to improve their studies.

Your child may feel embarrassment, or shame, at being identified to attend remedial lessons. In fact, before this, your child may already have been experiencing feelings of inadequacy, having fallen behind in their studies. This inadequacy may have manifested itself in various ways, such as a lack of motivation, and/or “acting up” in class, in order to express their frustration.

Helping your child to make full use of their remedial lessons

Enthuse your child by reminding them that this is a golden opportunity for them to be able to ask questions in a less intimidating environment. Work together with your child to work out where their weak areas are – you can also work together with their teacher for this – and get your child to write down a list of questions. This list of questions should enable them to work through their problem areas in their studies, thereby enabling them to get up to speed in their studies.

Work together with your child to ensure that they are reaping maximum benefits from their remedial classes. Remind them to pack in their books, and to take down notes during their classes.

At home, run through these notes with them, making sure to check against their highlighted weaker areas, and that they comprehend those topics better now. You can help your child to further revise by working on part year exam papers with them, or by using the timed assessments provided in many assessment books. Geniebook's suite of online learning tools can also help in this regard, such as the AI-personalised worksheet generator, GenieSmart.

All this will work to help your child build up not only their knowledge and skills, but also their confidence, now that they are no longer lagging behind.

The benefits of remedial programmes are many and varied, and at the end of it, your child will have a much better grasp of their studies. These remedial lessons will help them form and build a foundation for them to learn about a subject in greater detail.