A Checklist to help you develop the Individual Learning Plan (ILP)

Any busy person can vouch that checklists are vital for staying on track, keeping information organized, and accomplishing our goals. We create checklists for the mundane areas of life-like grocery shopping, school supplies or daily to dos- and for the bigger complex life events such as weddings, going to college, moving into a home or planning for retirement.

But, do you have a checklist for all the items you know are important for your child to learn and discover?

Think about this for a moment: As parents and adults we have financial plans, career plans, and fitness plans that help us focus and remember why we want to accomplish our heart's desire. Shouldn't it be the same for our children and students?

Between the ages of 6 to 18, children spend a majority of their waking hours focusing on learning and assimilating information. No matter how you view it, that is a long time to go without a specific plan to keep youth focused when the going gets tough.

Parents play a major role in helping their child understand how their learning style can help them achieve their goals in school and beyond.  Do all children know what they desire? Perhaps not, but they all have dreams that fuel their need to learn.

Most importantly do you know how your child loves to learn? Is it through reading, talking, playing, walking or observing? Each child has their own unique learning style that when activated makes learning and assimilating information a wonderful experience.

Follow these suggestions for setting up your child's Individual Learning Plan:

1) Start a file where you will keep all the information collected. One of the best ways to know how to go forward is to have resources and information to help with decisions located all in one place.( link to good record keeping)

2) Identify their learning style - this is fun! Why not do yours as well as your students? www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles.

3) Talk to the teachers at your school. Find out what is planned for the year so that you can help encourage your children during the growing times, and celebrate during the accomplished times .

4) Check out our resources page to learn how to engage your students in their learning environment. Popular resources include the ABBIT Society and The Road Map to Career Success.

Resource Review: The ABBIT Society
http://www.theabbitsociety.com/

Do you have a hard time motivating your child to want good grades? You aren't alone. It's not likely that all students will try their best in the classroom, on a daily basis, for the purpose of earning a grade.

The ABBIT Society program gives students a taste of how good success feels when it's earned and recognized by others! The theory behind The ABBIT Society program is that students, like working adults, need recognition, rewards, and benefits to help motivate them to do their best work every day.

For more than 22 years, The ABBIT Society has motivated hundreds of thousands of students to care about making good grades!  ABBIT gets the attention of students who may not be naturally motivated in the classroom and gives them a reason to do their best work!

Parent Drive School's highly recommends The ABBIT Society as one of the leading non-profit organizations connecting the community and parents in supporting children to own the process of getting better grades.

The ABBIT Society has designed several programs that help parents and teachers connect with local resources who promote a love of learning. To learn more, click here.

Or, to see how The ABBIT Society works, read this testimonial from a former member who is now a professor of education at Harvard University.

It began with a comment from her child's teacher and a spaghetti dinner.

During the spring of 1986 Sandy Wood-Dunham had a parent-teacher conference in which her son's teacher said, "Students don't care enough (about their grades) to even pick up their pencils".

Later, as she prepared a spaghetti dinner for her family, the teacher's comment haunted her. In her own experience as a teacher, she knew that her son's teacher's comment was true. If students weren't motivated by grades, then by what? From her experience as a teacher, she knew there was something missing. Something was intrinsically wrong.

She began by looking to the adult world of work. What motivated someone to go to work everyday and do their best? She concluded it came down to three things: recognition, rewards and benefits.

Adults go to work to support their families and derive the validation and dignity for a job well done. Yet, we as parents don't provide the same incentives to children to do their work. It dawned on Sandy that a report card every six weeks just wasn't enough. There had to be more incentive for a child to work hard everyday to earn A's and B's.

She says that to find her answer she had to think way outside the box. "The solutions inside the box are those that everyone has already tried. We had to do something very different."

The phrase "A's and B's because I try" came to her mind as she stared into a pot of spaghetti sauce. And that's when The ABBIT Society was born. She determined that children had to want to learn. "If you put a video game in the hands of a child, they'll learn, within minutes, how to play it. Why? Because they want to learn it. We had to do the same thing with school."

She took her idea to the district superintendent with the blessing of her school's principal and pitched her idea. To her  delighted surprise she was given a full endorsement. She implemented her program at Sam Houston Middle School in Marshall, TX in 1986, where she also taught math.

Offering students incentives through membership cards in the Society, which would be honored for discounts at local businesses, and constant praise for hard work, the school's honor roll increased by 48% in one grading period. Teachers began reporting that students had taken a sudden keen interest in their grades.

The ABBIT program provides membership cards that can be earned on a quarter-by-quarter basis. The card entitles Society members to discounts at local businesses, extra recess time on Fridays, special drawing for Society members, and more.

"One of the important things we've done is to extend this program beyond the honor roll. There are some kids who might work their hardest, yet not get A's and B's. If these kids work hard and practice the principles of the Society, they can earn an Honorary ABBIT Society card, with all the same benefits and rewards as an honor roll member.

After three years she left Sam Houston and began marketing her program nationally. Her philosophy is the same today as it was then: "I want students to learn how good success feels. I want students to wake up their intrinsic desires for learning. I want them to change their attitudes about learning and making good grades at young ages so they would be more likely to stay in school."

Sandy reports that this past year The ABBIT Society distributed over 40,000 membership cards to schools throughout the United States. To testify to ABBIT's effectiveness over the past 15 years, Sandy recently received a note from a former ABBIT Society member who was now a professor at Harvard. In the note she said that she actively used ABBIT Society principles in working with her graduate students.

To learn more about The ABBIT Society, go to www.theabbitsociety.com.