5 Tips to Achieve Your New Year's Resolutions!

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During the holiday season, we quickly forget the routines we have as a family. Social get-togethers, more unhealthy meals and longer times spent online or watching movies can gain the upper hand. As routines go out the door, parents need to manage winding their children back down to normal routines during the first days or even weeks after the holidays.

To ease back, there are various tools available for parents to help them carry on with their routines and educational activities at home such as morning routine, activity books, toys, puzzles and mobile applications. While it is definitely important to monitor children’s activities on smart devices, specifically developed apps can be a great tool for child development. For example, Otsimo Special Education is a special education app with developmental games created with child psychologists and special education teachers and can help children access special education at the comfort of their homes. Similarly, Brili is a routine app for setting and keeping track of daily routines with visual aids so that children can easily complete their school assignments or their tasks at home without becoming frustrated or distracted.

At Otsimo and Brili, we know that many families set New Year’s resolutions with big hopes in mind. However, we are also aware that many of these resolutions fail due to setting unrealistic and hard-to-achieve goals. That’s why Otsimo and Brili want to help families start the year with the right motivation and attitude to help them stick to their resolutions and make learning easy and fun at the same time. The following five tips for the New Year will help motivate your child to learn and understand the value of setting goals and successfully achieving them.

Tip 1: Plan Ahead

Making resolutions with your children can be fun and exciting. You can guide and make suggestions on what resolution could make sense for the New Year, but make sure your children come up with ideas themselves and how these can be embedded in the weekly routines.

One example could be to become a better piano player by Easter. To achieve the goal, your child could set a plan to practice 15 minutes a day during the school week. This is a realistic pre-set plan to achieve the goal. Primary school children can set their plan using Brili Routines by embedding the piano practise time in their afternoon homework routine. Brili also enables setting minimal times so you can ensure piano practice is never under 15 minutes a day.

Tip 2: Track Progress

Sticking to resolutions is difficult for us as adults, so don’t underestimate the potential challenge for your kids. By recording progress, you can help your children visualize how well they’re doing in achieving their goals. As time passes, you can check in to make sure your child stays on track. Is there something missing in the plan? Is it too unrealistic? Is there something that can be changed to help your child move forward? Don’t penalize if something is going wrong but make sure you guide your child to help achieve their goal.

Both Brili and Otsimo provide the ease of tracking how well children are doing in their routines to achieve goals. You can easily check in as a parent and make this a regular routine to show your child that you’re interested in their progress. Routines and activities can be easily adapted to help your child achieve their goals. Otsimo Special Education app offers detailed reports of your child’s progress so that you can keep track of their development and customize each game to suit your child’s needs. Making games more suitable will avoid frustration, and keep children more engaged as game difficulty changes.

Tip 3: Stay Organised

Helping your child organise their papers, books and assignments help them feel motivated to learn. Disorganization can lead to feeling overwhelmed. Overwhelmed children spend more time and effort being frustrated and worried than they do learning. Be patient but also consistent, for example, with regular routines to organise school supplies and assignments. This will help them feel in control, less overwhelmed, and more motivated to learn.

Resolutions can quickly become too overwhelming if you don’t have a plan. So staying organized helps form positive habits and can be part of the resolution. You’ll need to get granular to stay organized. App solutions like Brili and Otsimo Special Education provide the visualisation and granularity to help you stick to your plan. Staying organized is relevant for all ages to develop your child emotionally and with consistency.

Tip 4: Reward and Celebrate

Who doesn’t like to get a reward for achievements? The more immediate joy is linked to a goal, the more likely your child is to see the goal through. Researchers at Cornell University and the University of Chicago confirmed with their study “Immediate Rewards Predict Adherence to Long-Term Goals” that joy predicts success at New Year’s resolutions whereas “delayed rewards” did not. So help your child take pride with rewards to celebrate success.

Rewards can be set and defined with Otsimo and Brili. Together with your child, you can define the award to celebrate the success of achieving their goal. Brili Routines rewards your child with stars for each completed task and you can then set a target of stars that need to be achieved to redeem the award. Positive feedback and rewards help motivation stay high.

Similarly, Otsimo Special Education has a reward system consisting of giving out stars. By collecting these stars, children can progress through the levels in the app. In addition, at the end of the games, children can pop balloons and are encouraged with phrases like “Congratulations!”.

Tip 5: Create a Learning Plan

If your child has special needs, it is better to break down the educational routines and set a learning plan in detail to avoid getting distracted in the following days and months after the holidays. For example, you can assign a single topic for each day of the week; for instance, Mondays can be for language skills while you work on motor skills on Tuesdays. This way you can incorporate education efforts into your routine easily and more efficiently.

Otsimo Special Education can be a great help for parents in creating a learning plan. It has 12 categories and 90+ developmental games focusing on different skills such as language, social, math, motor skills and more. It also offers a free Developmental Screening Test and based on the answers a personalized Learning Path is created for each child. The difficulty in following games changes based on the child’s performance so it makes creating an effective learning plan a lot easier for parents.

If you have a school-aged child, the workload can be increasingly challenging and intense. You can support your child by setting up homework routines that provide a daily structure of completing assignments and staying organised. The Brili Routines app guides children through their tasks and prevents from feeling overwhelmed. Brili provides visual and acoustic reminders for all the steps of the homework routine and helps your child to feel in control while following their learning plan and reach their goal.

Whether your child is in kindergarten, primary or secondary school, including simple learning routines into your New Year’s resolutions will help your children develop a love for learning. Support your child’s development with these five tips now and see how it pays off throughout 2020!