How to Improve Your Child’s Grades
Posted: November 08, 2022
How to Improve Your Child’s Grades with Karate
Parents, are you concerned about your child's grades and poor performance at school?
If you are, you are not alone. Poor grades are top of the list for parents worries.
The problem with bad grades is the longer it takes to fix the problem the further the child is behind in school. The further behind they are the more they feel bad about their ability to learn. Making it even harder to get ahead. When their self-belief starts to get worse, it’s a spiral making it very difficult to improve their grades. If a child thinks they are not good enough, not smart enough, we are dealing with way more than just a bad report card.
The sooner we address the issue and get on track the easier it is for the child and the parent.
Let’s go over a few things you can do right now to solve this problem.
Before I give you some things you can do, let me say that if your child has a problem in just one subject, that is not as big of a concern. Even though it needs to be addressed. Normally, with a bit more study time, some tutoring, and guidance the grade goes up. We are talking about grades in most of the subjects. If a child is getting bad grades across the board, then there are deep reasons.
The first thing I would advise parents to do is work on the child’s self-belief.
If a child doesn’t believe in themselves, then we are fighting a very hard battle. What we can do as parents and teachers is to build self-belief in every way possible. That is not just telling the child that they can do it but proving to them that they can and then recognizing their effort.
Building self-belief is the first thing we do at the academy. We know that when a child learns karate or martial arts, we have an opportunity to prove to them that they can do it. It is so important that it is our first step in our 9-step program to greater confidence.
What you can do at home is to make sure you always stay positive, give your child small goals, and then praise their effort when they are done. It’s important that you praise effort and not ability.
At the karate school, we call it, being a good finder, even though it is a bit more complicated than that.
Once a child knows they can do something, even if that something is hard, like raising their grades, then they already have the foundation to start improving.
The next step I would advise parents to look at is the environment. It often gets overlooked. At the martial arts school, we make sure the environment is designed for learning. We start with respect, we make sure it’s very positive, then we sprinkle in focus drills, discipline, and fun.
At home, you can replicate the karate school’s environment by having a very clean area for the child to do their homework. A monitoring system to make sure the goal is chunked down to doable tasks. A reward system. Don’t make this hard. All we are talking about is a structured, disciplined environment with very few distractions.
Once those two things are done move on to focus. Yes, focus is a skill and like any skill, it can be taught, if it can be taught it can be improved. Don’t just tell your child to focus. Teach them what focus is, and how to focus, and their focus will start to improve. I know because we do it in every class.
If you are a parent and your child is really struggling in school, you need to start doing things differently if you want different results. Making a child feel dumb or slow or different is not the answer. Teaching them the foundations of success is.
Once you see your child start to believe in themselves, learn to focus, and listen, you are going to start to see a new child.
We all know that working with someone that wants to do it, is a lot different than working with someone that thinks they can’t or that they are not good enough.
If you want to see how many of our students have learned how to believe in themselves and raised their grades, then I invite you to check out our karate school. We are in Federal Way Washington. We know our program works. But don’t take our word for it. Read all the testimonials we have and if you want to come in for a FREE week of training and watch your child grow and become confident right before your eyes. It really is amazing to see a child change so quickly.
Respectfully,
Master Jones
