How much can you reasonably request your teen to do during summer for his or her own enrichment, outside of camps, classes, etc.?
I’m asking my teen to do SAT QOTD each day, plus some vocab and some Spanish study. Less than 30 minutes for all of this. Also, reading each day - either from a classic literature book or a major newspaper.
Needless to say, there’s lots of eye-rolling, harrumphing and whining.
Am I asking too much? I guarantee you Teen’s friend’s parents are asking a lot more from their teens.
Teen asks, why can’t I just aim for state school and not worry so much about grades?
What grade will they be in Sept 2015?
If they are scheduled to take PSAT’s let them know of scholarship opportunities if they perform well.
If they are in high school some kids learn better in a class room setting if they are not motivated to self study.
1/2 hour a day for the SAT is less because you want them to have the stamina to complete the whole test in one sitting. Also all state schools are not safety schools. Admission is quite competitive. Look at your local schools average SAT scores for those admitted.
Why don’t you like your home-state public U? If it offers your kid’s major, your kid can get in with the current GPA and no (or minimal) ACT/SAT score, and it is in your budget, then truly you can just back off.
Reading “challenging” literature is meaningless unless the reader has reason to use the vocabulary and discuss the concepts. Are all the adults in your family on board for reading the same tough stuff and then talking about it at the dinner table? If not, then let your kid get in his million words a year in his own way.
I let our kids select their reading material and they chose much more challenging material than I would have at a much more rapid pace than I was interested in at their ages. S on his own was reading our newspaper daily from 2nd grade and continues it now over 20 years later (tho it’s now the Washington Post). He & D are vorcaious readers because H & I have alreays loved books and reading–to them and ourselves.
For SAT prep, our kids guided themselsves as to how much they wanted to study and when they started to prepare. It did help D to take a formal SAT prep course the summer before her JR year because it exposed her and taught her math she hadn’t covered yet that was on the SAT. Both kids cruised through the vocabulary because they’ve loved reading all their lives. S refused to take any formal test prep because he was a NMF and was already scoring about the median SAT for our flagship U when he was in 7th and 8th grades.
“Classic literature” has no more intrinsic value than modern literature. And if your student is amongst the millions of readers who prefer nonfiction… In libraries, we see again and again that the strongest readers and lifelong readers are those who know what they want to read, and enjoy it. Yes, sometimes it’s good to try something new. But honestly, it is very damaging to insist on a particular title. What you want is for your student to love to read, and be enriched by the experience, to discover their interests and satisfy curiosity and engage…you can’t accomplish that by choosing for them. please don’t. Go find one of the bazillion “best” lists or ask for recommendations here – what does she like? what interests her? what book has she loved AND what has she hated? long? short? fiction? what genre? We ask all these questions to get a match. Try googling Quentin Blake’s Rights of Readers
I have an inlaw whose favorite reading material thru her childhood was Archie comics. She’s a very successful dermatologist! She still has cases and cases of the old comics!
I agree that live of reading is key, and kids really do learn a lot by example.
