In my most recent post, I wrote about the importance of continuing your study skills journey through the summer so you can enter your new school year in the fall ready to keep building on your successes, as well as to keep improving weaker skills. You may not have thought much about this before, but it only makes sense that entering a new year feeling prepared and confident is better than entering it feeling unprepared and overwhelmed. As true as that would be in any given year, it is perhaps even more true of this upcoming school year, because of how unique and challenging this past school year was. For some of you, the beginning of the new school year will mark your return to the classroom in over a year, and for all of you, it will bring other changes that will restore a sense of normalcy to your days. No matter what your situation was by the end of this school year, starting next school year will require some adjustment to changes, so the more prepared you feel, the better off you’ll be.
Just as I hope you will follow my advice about staying on your study skills journey this summer, so I will stay on the journey with you. In addition to posting blogs and study tips, I will also post activities you can do that will help you put my tips into practice. As I’ve said before in many of my blog posts, using these tips is not meant to take the place of anything you will learn from your teachers. Rather, using them is meant to complement and supplement what you do in class by making it easier for you to access, understand, and remember whatever new information you will learn, not only so you will be able to improve your grades in the present, but also so you will remember what you’ve learned in the future.
Whenever I post lessons and activities that put my tips into practice, I will include explanations of answers, both correct and incorrect, to help you develop the ability to reason through questions and answers you will face. Some of these might be things you will still hear from your teachers, some might be things you’ve heard in younger grades and have since forgotten, and some might be things you’ve never heard teachers say, either because they didn’t think they needed to say them, or because they think they’re saying too much. From where I sit, anything even one student needs me to say is not too much for me to say if it helps that student, so it is my hope that you will be able to use my website to answer questions you might not have even realized you had, then apply those answers to your schoolwork.
One of the reasons teachers don’t share this type of information is that they assume their students have either already learned it or will be able to figure it out. I know I have said this before, but it bears repeating now that one of the goals I had when I started this website was to provide you with the tools you might need to help you figure out the things that teachers assume, especially as you move through the grades, that you should be able to figure out for yourself. As a special education teacher, I realized very early on that while my students could certainly benefit from the various programs, theories and teaching methods meant to address their specific learning disabilities and other academic challenges, they also needed to hear practical advice and be taught how to specifically apply it so they could figure the things out for themselves that teachers thought they should have already known. Since that ability was a strength of mine that I had used throughout my schooling, not just to consistently do well with my studies, but also to compensate for my own challenges and limitations, I wanted to use that strength to help students for whom it was more of a challenge, and now, through the further development of this website, I hope to be able to do the same for you.
Though I hope that those of you who have visited my site for a while now already feel that I have shared quite a bit of useful information with you, and those of you new to it are beginning to recognize that that is what I aim to do, I want you all to know that I have a lot more to share. Though I will continue to offer new information to everyone, becoming a member of my site now will give you access to even more valuable tips, tricks, strategies, ideas and lessons that you can use, not only through the rest of the summer, but through next school year as well. As always my goal will be to give you more ideas and opportunities to develop your study skills, so I hope you will consider joining me on this journey, so that you will have more opportunities than ever before to develop your study skills and experience greater success.
Go to the link on my homepage to sign up for access to my new strategies practice page!