Top tips on how parents can support their child at school

Parents play a big role in encouraging their kids’ love of learning. Find out the best ways to support them emotionally and academically.

Can you remember your very first kindergarten teacher? Or the first time you wrote a complete sentence? Or learning the name of a hexagon?

Children will learn all this in Kindergarten but the real miracle is that most learn to read to a reasonable level in just 12 months.

While a child’s teacher does most of the heavy lifting, having a parent who knows when to help, when to guide and when to intervene with the teacher can give a kindergarten student a solid foundation for the remaining years of schooling.

News Corp have pulled together the ultimate guide on how best to support your child in school.

Today and for the remainder of the week, we offer you the ultimate guide on how to start out on the right track for academic success and to give your child the best emotional support possible.

Small habits from getting the amount of screen time right, to building a positive relationship with the teacher, to how best to help your child with homework all compound over years of schooling.

But the primary job a parent can do in kindergarten is to encourage a child to love school and to love learning.

And of course that is not simply academic.

That’s precisely why we’ve included how to support your child emotionally — from how to handle it when they don’t seem to be making friends to later in primary school when they will inevitably get in trouble.

Then there are a myriad other questions — like how much screen time to allow and dealing with online bullies or how to handle one of the cruellest moments in parenting: when the little child they sent along to kindergarten grows up and informs their parents how embarrassing they find them.

There is of course no magic bullet when it comes to schooling but it has been my observation after speaking to top achieving Year 12 students over the past few years that they did not spend 12 hours a day studying in their bedrooms.

They had a love of learning but also were passionate about a diverse range of interests, a great respect for their teachers and a curious interest in the world.

And those qualities invariably come from one place — their parents.