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Parent Today helps parents navigate four “chapters” of children’s lives: early learners, elementary school, middle years and high school. Each bimonthly e-newsletter will feature stories relevant to corresponding academic and developmental stages of children. Parent Today will also respond to current issues and provide information on the ever-changing education landscape.

High School

As students prepare for life beyond high school, they need to build skills to help them become self-sufficient. Parent Today stories will focus on areas in which parents can encourage responsibility and decision making, instill values and foster independence. We’ll also offer tips on how parents can — and why they should — stay involved as their children move through the teen years.

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Tackling textbook reading assignments

Strong reading comprehension skills will help students successfully navigate their school years. However, if your child has trouble concentrating when it comes to reading a textbook, how can you help?

There are a number of tried-and-true methods available to help develop better reading comprehension, but one that’s been around for decades is the SQ3R method. The basic idea (using a chapter of a textbook as an example) is to:

Survey: Skim the contents of the chapter, looking at section headings, graphs, charts and captions to determine what a chapter is going to cover.

Question: Create a question about each section of a chapter. For example, if a chemistry book’s section header says, “Properties of metals,” the question becomes, “What are the properties of metals?” Write that down!

Read: Concentrate and actively read, searching for the answer to the questions you have posed.

Recite/write: Review what you read – either say it aloud or write down a key phrase that sums up the section and answers your question. It will be easier to remember concepts if you use your own words rather than simply copying the text.

Review: If you’ve written a key phrase for each section of the chapter, you have basically created an outline. Look at your questions, answers, notes and the textbook to see how well you recalled information. If you can’t recall one of your key phrases, reread the section.