Extracurricular activities are beneficial because it gives your child an opportunity to do what they love while they build their self-esteem. It helps develop physical, social and intellectual abilities and can also help curb unpleasant attitude in children.
Though extracurricular activities have a lot of benefits, school work should come first because that's your child's first priority.
Here are some tips that can help your child manger their time effectively to achieve success in balancing school work and extracurricular activities.
It is important that you do not enrol your child in too many extracurricular activities which would start to affect school work time or that would make your child too fatigued to complete homework. Choose only activities that are important for your child.
For your child to conveniently balance school work and extracurricular activities, you have to ensure your child gets enough rest and is not sleep deprived. This could lead to poor concentration in school.
Teach your child to prioritise. Schools offer many extracurricular activities to meet the different needs of all learners. Let's look at Kim's schedule, she has piano practice after school, choir practice when she gets home and also has to study for a test, as a parent, you have more experience and maturity in seeing the importance of education which your child may not see. The test is most important so it is the top priority, choir practice can be moved to the next week after the test, piano practice would probably make Kim feel relaxed before studying for the test so that could be left on the to-do list for the day. Prioritising activities is key to every child's development.
Parents should set reasonable limits and also use activities your child enjoys to enhance academic work. For instance, I had a student who was part of the football team which he really loved, his mum told him if his grades do not improve, he would have to leave the team. This really helped to improve his grades.
Learning to cope and balance activities and responsibilities is part of a learner's education. Your child can learn these lessons best with your help and involvement.
