With colleges becoming more competetive, it's important to help students navigate high school and prepare for secondary education. Students need to learn how to organize, manage stress and often require supplemental material outside the classroom to help grasp complicated subjects. Here are 15 blog posts, books, websites and video series that can help parents get teenagers more prepared, even if graduation is years off.
1. Prepare students: A national survey by Achieve shows that half of high school students wished they had been pushed to do more in high school and felt underprepared for college. This Get Schooled blog post discusses the survey and how to help students.
2. Hemingway Editor: More than your average word count and spell check app, Hemingway Editor checks students' essays for readability and suggests ways to strengthen sentences by simplifying them.
3. Get It Together for College: Created by the College Board, this organizer will guide seniors through the process of applying to and preparing for college.
4. Learning to Breathe: This course helps students learn mindfulness and methods of quelling anxiety in the classroom so they can perform better without feeling pressured.
5. Use more worksheets: This AJC Get Schooled blog post explains how students struggling in math might benefit more from traditional math drills and worksheets than group activities or math-related games.
6. Anki: This flashcard program shows learners facts at intervals based on how well they've learned them so they can better retain the information.
7. Teenagers 101: A high school teacher and mother gives insights on ways that parents can support teenagers inside and outside of the classroom.
8. Big History Project: Funded in part by Bill Gates, the Big History Project combines science, astronomy and history to teach online learners about how the universe and Earth began.
9. Codecademy: This free online tool takes students through interactive lessons in several coding languages and teaches learners the beginnings of making their own programs.
10. Get a tutor: Getting a tutor or taking your child to a tutoring center can be indispensable for high school students and students who are starting college-level classes, as discussed in this AJC article.
11. Duolingo: This language-learning program has more than a dozen languages to choose from and can provide great secondary support to a student taking foreign language classes.
12. HabitRPG: An online organizer with a twist, HabitRPG uses the themes of 16-bit role playing video games to help users get organized. Users earn gold by completing daily tasks and lose health for the chores they don't finish.
13. Khan Academy: Created by an educator in 2006, Khan Academy uses short YouTube videos and interactive drills to teach students higher math, history, science and a number of other subjects.
14. The Secrets of Top Students: This book helps students as young as middle school learn how to take notes, write papers, and be prepared to succeed in high school and college.
15. CrashCourse: Novelist John Green and his brother Hank Green use 10-minute videos to break down astronomy, history, U.S. politics and other topics in an engaging way for high school students.
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