With the March holidays coming up, it’s crucial to help your child build healthy learning habits. While PSLE might seem like the finishing line, it’s really only the beginning. Learning is a lifelong journey, a marathon rather than a sprint. Building good learning habits takes months or even years but they will serve you for the rest of your life.
However, at times, your child may not have the luxury of time. This is especially so when there’s a test coming up and your child needs to revise quickly and learn a lot, fast. Nevertheless, when your child is swamped with a never-ending to-do list and examination dates creeping up, they may find themselves seized with fear and eventually succumb to procrastination and burnout.
What is study burnout? Burnout is the state of physical and emotional exhaustion, typically caused by long periods of stress. It is important to be able to recognise the signs of study burnout and how to deal with them healthily. Some warning signs include a sudden decrease in academic performance, feeling unmotivated and bored, constant mental and physical exhaustion, and inability to concentrate on schoolwork.
How to study hard without burning out? Now that we can identify study burnout, here are some strategies that your child can easily implement into their study routine to have higher quality study periods.
- Concrete study hours
Instead of trying to study for hours and hours on end, your child would find it a lot more productive to have a fixed schedule where they can set aside a certain number of hours dedicated to studying hard in a comfortable, distraction-free environment. Having concrete hours would reduce feelings of guilt when your child is not studying, allowing your child to maintain a healthy balance between their hobbies and schoolwork. Within this allocated time, they may utilise commonly used techniques such as the Pomodoro method we’ve written about before. Forcing themselves to study would simply put them in an unfocused haze of semi-work and before they know it, they’ll realise that they didn’t remember as much as they would have liked. It is crucial that they take ample breaks while studying as well. Breaks can help prevent fatigue and improve their concentration.
- Active learning
Another strategy your child can implement is to replace passive learning with active learning. What is passive learning? Tasks like re-reading notes or skimming are considered passive learning tasks and aren’t great when your child is aiming for quality revision as they have no way of checking whether they are incorrect or not. Instead, they could switch these tasks out for active learning tasks such as self-testing or practice papers. This way, they can practice what they have been taught in school and identify their knowledge gaps.
- Communicate feelings
Last but not least, have open communication with your child and do mental health checks. Encourage your child to communicate their feelings with you and other loved ones. If they are feeling frustrated and unmotivated for long periods of time, maybe it’s time to have a change of pace and scenery.
Our Learning Lodge is a tuition centre that caters to students from different schools, backgrounds and standards. We are situated at Block 813 Jurong West Street 81 #B1-184 Singapore 640813 and you can contact us via WhatsApp (+65 9727 2203), Facebook or Instagram if you are looking for a tuition centre for your Lower Secondary and Primary school child.
