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When I was visiting with my sister-in-law this weekend, I noticed that she had a lot of homework, but she had put it off to the last minute. That meant that she was stressed out about getting it done, as wasn’t sure that she would. There are many teens that choose to do their homework this way, and it often means they don’t do a good job. There is nothing like doing something at the very last minute to ensure that you make a lot of mistakes. Parents should try to establish good middle school study skills so that they are better equipped when they enter high school and have even more work to do.

The middle school study skills that children develop during the early teen years will go with them the rest of the way through school and on into college. This means that what they learn then will set the course for future success or failure. It might not seem like a big deal, but it can be with some children. Parents may have been very successful in school, and that usually means they had also developed very good middle school study skills. They would be smart to pass on what worked for them to their children, even when it takes a bit more than mild persuasion to get them on the right track.

If you don’t know anything about middle school study skills, think about what works best when you are at work. For the most part, putting things off to the last minute means that mistakes are going to be more common, and the stress levels are much higher. Encourage your children to do their homework before they do other things each day after school. When they have homework on the weekends, encourage them to do it Friday night or Saturday morning so that they are not cramming things in on Sunday night. If they have a vacation from school, have them do their work right away so they can enjoy the rest of their time off.

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My son has done really well throughout his academic career thus far, but as high school graduation looms closer and closer, he still has no idea how to choose a college that would be best for his future. In fact, he’s still not even sure where his academic or career interests lie, making a final decision nearly impossible to contemplate. He clearly needs help learning how to choose a college, so I’m going to step in and offer my advice.

For starters, I told him that a great way to learn how to choose a college was by finding out the different ways other people have approached the problem. Fortunately, there are plenty of good websites on the Internet that contain valuable insight from students and counselors alike. These sites can help prospective students set out preliminary criteria and develop a plan of action to find good schools. By simply spending an afternoon reading about how to choose a college online, my son now has a wealth of information at his fingertips and can begin evaluating his situation more intelligently.

In doing so, he soon realized that selecting a major was not necessarily the best first step in how to choose a college. That was good news, considering the fact that he did not have the slightest idea which studies he wanted to pursue. Instead, he focused on finding a university in a location that he would enjoy and that had a decent student-teacher ratio. After those two considerations, he looked at things like study abroad opportunities, quality of student life, extracurricular activities on campus, and graduation rates.

By researching how to choose a college online, my son also learned that it would be a good idea to apply to at least a couple of “safety schools” in addition to the more prestigious universities that he might want to attend. This would allow him to cover his bases while still reaching out for his dream school, and give him some peace of mind during the application process.

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