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Your child has been accepted for college and you couldn’t be prouder. However, if this is the first time you’ve had to wave a child off to college, there are probably many things going around in your head about how they are going to cope.  Apprehension, mixed with excitement for your teen, is natural for any parent.

Here are our top five tips for parents of new college students to help you and your child through the first year.

Encourage Your Child to Keep in Close Contact with Their Academic Advisor

Regularly checking in with their course advisor will help keep your child on track with their studies. It will also ensure that they don’t end up in a situation where they must take extra classes (at an extra cost) to catch up. Their advisor will help keep them on track with their credits and ensure they’re making the required progress towards their degree.

It’s always easier to nip any problems in the bud than to try and catch up later. These professionals can also help with things like creating a recommendation letter, finding clubs on campus, or offering valuable study tips so building and maintain a relationship with them is a great idea.

Investigate Local Scholarships or Those Offered by the University

Set up a meeting for you and your child with the university’s scholarship department to learn more about available scholarships. Quite often the university will hold general meetings to provide details of funding offered. Encourage your child to apply for scholarships and grants online. They can build a profile before they can be matched to eligible scholarships for college. If something suitable is available, they can then apply directly.

Note that funds from a scholarship can be added to the student finance account at any time during the school year, not just at financial check-in. So, if you haven’t already looked at scholarships, it’s not too late.

Keep Records of All College Expenses That Are Tax Deductible

If you are supporting your child financially, the college will send you a tax form at the end of the year. Ask your child to keep and send you receipts for purchases that are related to their coursework such as books, supplies and equipment. You can then use these as tax deductibles.

Find Out if There is a Parent Program at the College

We all know how our children forget to keep us informed about what’s going on. Joining a parent program will help to keep you in the loop about any opportunities and events for parents and families on campus. The program may include activities such as family sports days, barbecues, and tailgate parties. Ask about the possibility of joining at move-in or orientation day and sign up for any newsletters that may be available.

Find Out What Books They Will Actually Need

Don’t rush out and buy all the books on the reading list. You may find yourself paying for books that are never used. Most textbooks can be found at used book sites online or can be loaned from a library. If a student emails the teacher in advance, they can ask if a particular textbook is needed. Sometimes they are not. Students can also access books via online forums from prior students of the course either for free or a very low cost.

Nurture Independence

As a parent, your instinct can be to help your kid as much as possible. The problem with this well-meaning impulse is that it can result in a child growing toward adulthood who is unprepared to solve problems on their own. It can feel good when your kid needs you, but it’s to their detriment if you prize this over letting them be independent. It’s important to let them feel proportionate consequences for their actions; if they don’t study for a test or complete an assignment, they won’t get a good grade on it.

Dealing with the Change in Your Life

The academic life of a child is a time of nearly constant change.  It can be often be tough to cope with, especially if they no longer want to do the same activities with you that they used to or seem to be pulling away from you. It’s important to remind yourself that as long as they aren’t moving toward something harmful, this pulling away is a sign you’ve been successful. Of course, you can continue to be a support to your child while preparing them to be their own person and to take on the world with confidence.

Resources for University and College Prep

• Should your child go to trade school or college?

If you have a child with a speech disorder or impairment, speech therapy involves assessing and treating all types of speech disorders and communication problems.  Speech therapists use a variety of techniques like language intervention and articulation therapy activities.

Speech conditions range from articulation delays to complex disorders like down syndrome, autism, motor speech disorders, hearing impairment, and other developmental problems that affect children.

Speech-language pathology meets the child where they are according to their individual issues.  While the main goals of a speech therapist is to improve communication, there are other benefits that help children in a number of ways.

If you’re unsure whether speech therapy is suitable for your kid, here are five benefits you should to know:

1. Enhanced Articulation Skills

One of the benefits speech therapy offers kids who need it is enhanced articulation skills. In speech, articulation refers to a child’s ability to move their lips, tongue, palate, and jaw to produce speech sounds or phonemes.

Speech issues have a lifelong negative effect and should be addressed immediately. If you have a kid that has a speech disorder, his articulation skills may be compromised due to decreased intelligibility if no speech therapy is offered. Intelligibility refers to people’s understanding of your child’s speech.

Getting a speech therapist to help your child develop articulation skills can ensure that he produces sound patterns or speech sounds in a way that increases intelligibility in the future.

2. Improved Expressive Language

Although speech is primarily involved in developing a person’s motor ability to speak, language is more symbolic of rules used to pass a message. Symbols can include words that are either written or spoken. They may also include the use of gestures like waving to mean ‘bye bye’, shoulder shrugging to mean ‘I don’t know,’ or raising eyebrows to communicate surprise.

Hiring a speech therapist can help children with speech disorders learn new words, and combine them to form sentences and phrases. This enables children to communicate better with you and other people.

3. Develop Receptive Skills

Another benefit of speech therapy for kids is the development of receptive or listening skills. Speech therapists work with kids to improve their receptive language to listen and understand better. In many cases, kids have a strong sense of what they understand but struggle with expressive language.

If your child struggles with receptive and expressive language, a speech therapist can help him overcome this challenge. Speech therapists do this by teaching them new vocabulary and showing them how to apply it when answering questions, following directions, and engaging in simple conversations.

4. Reduced Stuttering

Some kids develop stuttering during childhood. Stuttering is a common speech disorder that affects kids’ speech fluency. Often, this disorder is characterized by a broken speech flow known as disfluencies. Although every person experience disfluency in speech at one time or another, too many disfluencies can affect one’s ability to communicate effectively.

Primary indicators of stuttering that may require the help of a speech therapist include prolongations, repetitions, blocks, and interjections. Some secondary behaviors may also be present in severe stuttering cases. These include tension in the face, chest, jaw, neck, and shoulders.

People with severe stuttering conditions may also flare their nose, blink their eyes and perform odd facial movements. Further, they may experience extraordinary motor movement with their upper and lower limbs, like stomping their feet and clenching their fists.

Whether your kid shows mild or severe stuttering behavior, working with a speech therapist can help them develop strategies for controlling such behavior in a way that enhances speech intelligibility and fluency.

5. Reduce Voice Hoarseness

The other benefit that speech therapy could offer kids is reducing voice hoarseness caused by voice disorders. In most cases, kids experience hoarseness, a voice disorder that results from vocal abuses that damage or strain their vocal folds.

Vocal abuse includes habits like yelling, coughing, excessive talking, and throat clearing. Speech therapy enables kids to repair damaged or weakened vocal folds while helping them reduce practices relating to vocal abuse. Moreover, speech therapy can help kids improve voice quality by addressing sound vibration in the nasal, oral, and pharyngeal cavities.

Final Thoughts and Resources

Speech therapy is an effective way of treating speech disorders in children. Everyday speech disorders that affect kids in their childhood include poor articulation, hoarseness of voice, stuttering, and receptive language. This will more than likely bring increased anxiety.

If these disorders are left unaddressed, the ability of your child to communicate effectively in the future may be affected. If you think your kid suffers from a speech disorder or impairment, engaging a speech therapist can help him overcome the challenge and communicate better as he grows up.

Explore this guide on speech pronunciation for kids, provided by Maryville University.  The guide provides detailed insights and resources on the following topics:

• Types of Speech Disorders
• Activities Parents Can Use to Teach Pronunciation
• Helpful Tools and Professional Speech Therapy
• Meeting Speech Pronunciation Goals for Kids and more

Explore Additional Resources on this website:

• The pros and cons of online speech therapy for kids
• The benefits of text to speech readers

More so than ever before, today’s kids are a generation of digital learners. Technology such as videos and smartphone apps are revolutionizing the way parents teach their kids the basics, such as their ABC’s and 123’s. And among the wide variety of options, parents need programs they know they can trust.

Kids Academy is an educational platform that offers both parents and schools a wide range of interactive learning materials to supplement early learning for kids in preschool through the third grade. Not only do they offer a website jam packed with free learning resources, but the Talented and Gifted app also provides a structured and individualized curriculum that utilizes AI technology to score worksheets and deliver feedback for standards-aligned activities. What’s more is that all content on the app is safe and age-appropriate, and there are no ads or in-app purchases.

As mentioned above, there are two main hubs for Kids Academy content: their website, and their Talented and Gifted app. Let’s take a more detailed look at what each offers to families.

Free Educational Games, Worksheets, and Videos

The Kids Academy website boasts of a huge collection of worksheets that cover subjects across different curricula to meet the educational needs of preschoolers and early elementary students. These worksheets can be downloaded, printed, or played online in a browser; and for all the options there’s auto-checking that can deliver immediate feedback. In all, there are over 3,000 worksheets on a variety of topics that include catchy graphics and engaging voiceovers to help struggling readers and pre-readers.

In addition to worksheets, Kids Academy is also compiling a fun collection of interactive learning games that children can play for free from their web browser. Parents can find a little bit of everything in their collection of games, including foundational skills for preschoolers, such as letter tracing or sorting games, as well as more advanced games to help older kids master concepts like skip counting or using decimals.

Another exciting resource on the Kids Academy website is engaging learning videos and songs that serve to teach learners about the very concepts they are already working on using the worksheets. Many times, the videos are hosted by real educators who directly teach the concept and walk children through a connected worksheet available on the website. In fact, the site offers parents an option to select complete lessons in which worksheets, quizzes, games, and videos are bundled together to make cohesive lessons without needing to compile the materials separately. It’s never been easier for parents to find exactly what their child needs, all in one place!  Discover additional online learning resources for kids of all ages.

The Talented and Gifted App from Kids Academy

While many of the same resources included in the Talented and Gifted app are also available on the website, the app has a multitude of unique features that make for a richer, more individualized learning experience. Worksheets, videos, and games are all included in the app, but parents and students will also benefit from the following:

• Structured curricula that take children along a learning pathway via chapters and lessons. Parents choose the starting grade or skill level, and children progress gradually as they learn and gain skills.

• Quizzes that recap what’s been learned and assess a student’s progress; in addition to that, parents receive a weekly progress report via email that details their child’s performance.

• The app contains different choices for how content is displayed; for instance, there is an Adventure Land section where activities are grouped around small, digestible topics and always include game to make for a more engaging experience for struggling learners.

• There is a motivational game called Dress-Up Eddie, which is an exciting element that gives children the ability to spend the earned points to customize a cute character with funny costumes.

In all, there are over 4,000 activities contained within this educational app to keep kids motivated and learning. Just like the content included on the website, all materials in the app are age-appropriate, cover all major subjects, and are created in partnership with expert educators who have curated high-quality learning content in a way that learners will love.

In just the past couple of decades, the way that children learn has drastically changed. Parents and their children now have the option to supplement learning with innovative technology that can boost early learning skills like never before! Kids Academy helps families in this endeavor by providing the highest quality learning materials on both their website and mobile app.

Find out even more about Kids Academy and look for their app on Google Play or on the App Store!

The American mathematician Paul Lockhart affirms that Mathematics is the “art of explanation”. A quote which hits the nail on the head: as a Science it is of enormous importance, because it can be used to describe a multitude of real phenomena and to help us understand the world around us.

Therefore, ideally, people should become familiar with the world of numbers and learn at an early age how to use them to solve problems.

Equipped with an understanding of the basic concepts of mathematics, children learn to describe and analyze quantities, discover space and shapes, establish relationships between objects, etc. In other words, they acquire skills and competencies that help them, from that moment on, to better know and understand reality and to respond to it according to their needs.

This is why a child’s first contact with mathematics represents a crucial moment that can mark their subsequent relationship with maths.

The teaching innovation for a “friendly” mathematical approach to problem solving

This is where the methodological approach takes on vital importance. Mathematical curricular learning must be strongly influenced by the latest technological innovations and new pedagogical strategies, so that young pupils can benefit from a program tailored to their needs and immediately receive the keys to interpret their environment and carry out problem solving from a numerical perspective.

And, along these lines, the new techniques selected and developed to teach this subject place less emphasis on calculation, while prioritizing customized content and the use of efficient mechanisms to reinforce the most important conceptual aspects.

As such, the most pioneering approaches propose ‘simple mathematics’ techniques, where the manipulation of objects and the performance of simple exercises are the paths by which children can achieve four clear objectives:

• Problem solving
• The ability to reason, deduce and argue
• The ability to connect ideas and/or concepts
• The ability to both communicate and represent mathematical information via any channel

Learning mathematics through video games is possible

One of the first forms of manipulative teaching to emerge in Spain is the ‘ABN Method (Algorithms Based on Numbers)’. It was devised by Jaime Martínez Montero in order to make it easier to learn traditional mathematics, thanks to the use of operations that are completely understandable by the pupil. How? Quite simply, by converting quantities into realities that can be manipulated: lentils, marbles, toothpicks or rubbers. Thus, through visualization and manipulation, pupils assimilate the mathematical concept behind each figure much more easily, from outside the world of numbers, in addition to learning to establish associations.

However, at ProFuturo we have gone a little further, by developing an even more distinctive and innovative methodology for learning mathematics. Through the collaboration of Fundación Telefónica Perú and the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Perú, we have promoted the ‘Mathemagical Oracle’ project as a didactic and gamified learning approach to this branch of knowledge.

The result of this work has been the creation, by computer programmers and educators from the aforementioned university, of a pioneering application in Latin America. This application is aimed especially at pupils between the ages of 10 and 14 so that, through an approach based on exercises and games, they can learn mathematics in a fun and adventurous context. Mainly, because the video game motivates pupils, presenting them with constant challenges and constant trial and error situations, within an interesting narrative context that blends history and magic.

In fact, it is no coincidence that the characters pupils may encounter on their adventures within the application are strongly inspired by great mathematicians of universal renown, such as Hypatia of Alexandria, Liu Hui, Leonardo Fibonacci or Alan Turing. And so, gGuided in this manner, children and young people approach the development of their mathematical skills with passion and ambition, and enjoy tackling problems that, in another context, they might find uncomfortable and boring.

‘Problem Solving in the World of Numbers’, an accessible resource to make math easy

And that’s not all, because, by way of our resources directory, we also make available to teachers the teaching unit ‘Problem Solving in the World of numbers’. Because this is meant to be a starting point for the curricular learning of Mathematics, it proposes a series of customizable challenges for pupils which give them the opportunity to face challenges involving reasoning, deduction or analysis.

For its correct use children (ages 6 to 8) will not need to already be familiar with this discipline. Because, in reality, this unit poses some ‘simple mathematics’, while offering teachers the necessary tools to guide pupils through its most relevant concepts. So that, once they have finished, they understand the cultural and social usefulness of numbers, know how to use them in simple tasks (ordering, comparing or identifying) and learn to interpret, organise and represent them in different contexts.

In short, tremendously useful skills that get them off to a good start in the world of mathematics and, more importantly, motivate them to approach mathematics with desire and enthusiasm, thanks to a methodological approach where their experience is the central axis and the idea of learning by playing is behind each exercise.

Learn about limits in calculus (definition and rules) and why students find limit calculation difficult.