Pupils or students arriving late for school or lectures is  a typical problem in education. Common methods for attempting to solve this problem including noting incidents of lateness, informing parents or threatening the culprits with punishment. If these conventional solutions aren’t working, try a more collaborative approach that employs the principles of Kids’ Skills:

1. Avoid speaking to latecomers about “being late”. Talk instead about learning to be on time or learning to get to school or lectures on time.
2. Rather than noting down every instance of lateness or using the school’s computer system, start – if this is possible – by marking instances of children arriving on time.
3. If you can, rather than informing parents about their child being late, begin informing them about the times when their offspring have arrived at school or class on time.
4. Help pupils think about what could help them get to school or class on time more often. Encourage them to come up with ideas of their own that could help them succeed in doing this.
5. If arriving on time proves really difficult for a pupil, help them work out which skill would help them succeed in being on time more often. Skills that could help include, among others, learning to go to sleep earlier, learning to keep an eye on the time, or learning how to become better at planning ahead.
6. Encourage pupils to think about how their classmates could help them get to school on time more often.
7. Help them think about how they might like their parents to support them in being on time more often, and what might be good ways of asking their parents for this type of help.

If you are a child’s parent or caregiver, try, with slight modifications, using similar principles to the ones outlined above in conversations with your child at home.

This article is owned by: Kids’Skills http://www.kidsskillsapp.com/