Back to School: Parents' Guide to Mitigating the Effects of Education's Long COVID on Their Children

In the post-COVID world, education's landscape has been forever changed. Recent data from NWEA, a K-12 assessment provider, reports that pandemic recovery has stalled for most students, particularly among upper elementary and middle school students who suffered setbacks in reading and math.

• On average, students need four more months of schooling to reach pre-pandemic levels, while this year's ninth graders face the prospect of an extra school year.
• First through third graders showed some improvement, but it only brought them back to an already unequal state.

The data, gathered from 6.7 million students who took MAP Growth tests, emphasizes the pandemic's lasting impact on learning outcomes. The urgency is compounded by the recent decline in reading and math proficiency among 13-year-olds nationwide. To aid the most affected students, parents, educators and stakeholders must provide support for students during this critical time in education.

Parents can make small changes at home to bolster their child's academic progress.

Rachel Mead, Director of Tutoring at Study.com, provides a range of simple tips for parents to prepare their children for success during the upcoming 2023/2024 school year and beyond.

Cater to your child's preferred learning modality.

Parents can support their child's academic progress and make learning an enjoyable experience by tailoring their at-home educational approach to their child's strengths:

• For auditory learners, consider using audiobooks and encouraging active listening methods like notetaking, drawing visual representations, character mapping or Venn diagrams.
• Alternatively, if your child is a kinesthetic learner, you can provide them with a yoga ball-style desk chair or a standing desk and encourage movement during reading or listening sessions. Using colored highlighters is another easy way to practice active reading.

Practice cycling review to help information transition from your child's short-term to long term-memory.

Cycling review involves revisiting and relearning information at specific intervals, enhancing long-term retention and retrieval. Cycling review optimizes memory consolidation, strengthens neural connections, and promotes better knowledge retention, leading to more effective learning outcomes. To help optimize your child's learning outcomes, parents can easily implement cycling review into their family routine.

• Take notes throughout the week of what your child is working on. This process doesn't need to be intense; a voice or text note on your phone or a couple of sticky notes is sufficient.
• Once a week, come back and discuss concepts or information from earlier in the week and see how your child is processing the information. Repeat this cycle again at the end of the month.

Tips for parents of K-6th graders

Math tips:

• Get your child in the kitchen cooking or baking, using measuring spoons and cups
• Work with your child to use a tape measure and work on finding area and volume
• Identify and discuss patterns in your child's home environment
• Play Monopoly Jr.

Reading tips:

• Consistency is key. Block 10-15 minutes every other day of dedicated reading time for kindergarten through second graders, and 20-30 minutes every other day for third through fifth graders.
• Provide younger children with a journal with their favorite character on it to encourage free-form writing
• For middle-grade students, read with them and have the child and parent switch off reading aloud different chapters of the book
• With fiction, discuss with your child what they predict may happen next
• Encourage children to draw pictures related to images generated in their head from the reading

Writing tips:

• Get a journal with your child's favorite characters, sports team or musicians
• Assign a theme for creative writing - a letter of the alphabet, a color, an animal, an emotion

Tips for parents of 6-12th graders

Math tips:

• Ask your child to estimate sales tax for a purchase, tip at a restaurant, or interest on a credit card or savings account
• Play Monopoly!
• Calculate change if something were to be paid in cash
• Find the new sales price based on a dollar amount or percentage discount

Reading tips:

• Read the same book with your child and then once a week at dinner, discuss the book as a family (similar to a book club)
• If struggling to find any books your child is interested in, try biographies of people they follow or idolize
• Find books that have been turned into movies to compare & contrast. If it's not already a book, who would you cast in the movie and why?

Writing tips:

• Ask your child to map out a dream vacation or write a parody of a song they love
• Create the back story for a character of a TV show you watch
• Create a comic strip

Practice the Pomodoro technique

The Pomodoro technique helps improve focus, productivity and time management skills, allowing students to maintain better concentration and avoid burnout during learning.

• Work with your child to identify a learning or studying task
• Set a 25-minute timer and instruct your child to work on the task until the time is complete
• After the 25 minutes are complete, your child can take a 5-minute break. Every four pomodoros, take a longer break (15 to 30 minutes) to help your child stay mentally fresh