Encourage your child to elaborate by asking them how what they learned in school applies to their everyday experiences. Find opportunities to ask “how” and “why” questions about the way things around you work. It’s ok if you don’t know the answer yourself – you can explore this with your child. But, do make sure to look up the correct answer so you can both learn it! If your child is working on a problem-solving task, such as in math or science, ask them to describe what they are doing on each step – quite literally, what is going through their minds as they try to solve the problem. This can help you see where they are going wrong, but more importantly, it will help them understand the process better.

Point out concrete examples in your environment that might relate to what your child is studying at school. For younger children, you should be able to obtain a weekly curriculum, where you can find the themes and topics your child is learning about at school; these could be a good basis for the concrete examples you point out. For older children, don’t worry if you don’t have access to their class materials – they’re old enough to tell you what they are learning, which will help them because they’ll be engaging in retrieval practice while telling you! See below for more about that.

Help your child represent the concepts they are learning both visually and verbally, using simple sketches and explanations. With younger children, this might be something you are already doing naturally when you read to your child and they are looking at the pictures in the book while you read. Your child might spontaneously point things out in the pictures as the words you are reading describe them, or you can stop reading and make a deliberate effort to explain how the picture relates to the words. With older children, you can still take a look at pictures or visuals that represent the concepts they are learning at school. If you come across a picture that is relevant to what they are studying, save it, and have a conversation about it with your child. Demonstrate to your children that artistic proficiency is not necessary for depicting ideas visually; show them how just a quick, rough sketch can illustrate a concept. For a bit of fun, you can take turns drawing and describing concepts with your child, making it into a game!

Practicing retrieval at home can be as simple as asking children at some point after school what they learned that day. It is ok if you don’t know much about the material they are describing – just let them do most of the talking! If you can encourage your child to describe and explain the information from their memory, then you are helping them practice retrieval and reinforcement of what they’ve learned.

You can also encourage spaced retrieval practice. When your child is doing their homework, ask them how what they are learning now relates to what they learned earlier in the school year (or, even previous years!), and encourage them to think back to the previous information in order to come up with the answer. By doing this, you are helping your child practice spaced retrieval, combining two of the most powerful learning strategies. Doing this also encourages interleaving – switching between different concepts – which can help students learn to distinguish between different ideas. For example, if a young child is practicing subtraction, it helps if they understand how that process is different from addition. Or, if a high schooler is studying differentiation, it’s useful if they know how that is similar but different to integration.

Even the best learning strategies become less effective when children are not getting enough sleep. Sleep is very important for consolidating, or reinforcing, what has been learned. Sleep will make your child’s spaced practice more beneficial. Importantly, spacing practice out across the week (rather than cramming practice right before tests) can help alleviate the need for students to stay up very late studying before tests. So, spacing out practice helps your children get sleep, and sleeping more makes the spaced practice even more effective! Research shows that when students get a good night’s sleep, they will remember more of the material they studied, and they will be able to relearn anything they forgot more quickly and more easily.