How to make your kids happy in school

Eight-year-old Riza has spent more than four years attending different schools. A bright kid, Riza excels in just about every subject. There’s one problem though. For the past four years, Riza has been enrolled in at least five different schools. Anna and her husband George cannot seem to know what’s wrong with their precious and only daughter. She’s an A-student, but her teachers complain of her being very shy and contemptuous with her classmates. Her classmates want to make friends with her, but she seems unable to respond.

“We encounter such cases in our school,” says Emil Ong, director for school development at Reedley International School in Libis Quezon City. “I have met some kids who are confused because they have studied in different schools and yet remain unhappy and unmotivated. They seem to have very few friends.”

According to Ong, there are at least four reasons why some kids are unhappy in school. One is that teachers sometimes forget to spend quality time with their students. The culprit? Classroom size. Most schools have classrooms with 40 or more students clustered together. The more students per classroom, the less time spent by teachers with each student. That’s why, says Ong, their school makes sure that their classroom size does not exceed 25 students per class.

Preschool is the most important time in the life of every kid. It’s when their minds are susceptible to everything they see around them. It is also the best time to teach them how to behave properly, how to conduct themselves well with other people, and how to develop and cultivate strong relationships with their parents, peers, and classmates.

Another factor, which Ong states is critical, is that most schools give more importance to making students proficient in math, the sciences, and languages. Schools tend to stress the arithmetic method of teaching while all the more forgetting about teaching kids some life skills. “Teaching life skills is what makes kids happy,” says Ong, who holds a master’s degree in education from the Ateneo de Manila University and now manages Reedley International School. “You may excel in your subjects in school, but if you don’t know how to interact and cultivate strong relationships with others, if you don’t know how to behave appropriately in social circles, if you lack the skills to manage your time, chances are, you’ll have difficulty in attaining and maintaining success in all aspects of your life.”

Ong cites a recent 2008 study which says that kids start learning about the essential things in life in preschool. “One popular book says that everything you need to know, you learn in kindergarten. It is important that kids spend their preschool years in the right and proper environment,” Ong notes.

How to make our kids happy in school depends much on how we actually choose the right school that fits well with our kids. A happy kid, says Ong, is more open to learning, easier to teach, and closer to their parents than, say, a kid who just goes to school because he needs to.

For more information on how to make your kids happy in school, go to the Reedley International school website at www.reedleyschool.com.

Reedley International School approaches learning uniquely by combining the Singaporean method of proficiency in math and science and the US high standards in English and Humanities.