In honor of the biggest time for New Year’s Resolutions….
I am so so so excited that this project is finally ready to bring to you, my readers. As many of you know I have been working with families and teens for the past year and when I had to start a wait list, because I could not see all the families who apply, I knew I had to expand it a bit.
Over the past year, I have written the program I do with teens into a 12 Part program and have begun to hire associates (or, as we call ourselves, mentors) to work with me and the families. I love doing this, because now I am able to not only reach more families, but also have a variety of mentors to work with different kinds of students. We now have both males and females, artists, entrepreneurs and athletes to work with each type of student we get.
I am also making plans to bring this to other cities! So, if you are not in Los Angeles and you are interested, just shoot me an email!
Program Overview
-2 hour sessions, 1 time per week, 12 weeks (skip for vacation weeks)
-Lesson Plans are individually crafted for students after meeting one.
-During every lesson, mentors and students will touch on current homework, projects, quizzes or other current issues in the teen’s life. They will also do weekly “ROS” (Routine Operating Procedure) like checking the planner, cleaning out the desk and binders and backpack with a 5 minute timer.
-Each lesson includes activities, homework and guided lessons using all mediums (we have templates as well as online resources we use).
Sample Self-Improvement Tools
Here are Some Sample Tools We Will Be Going Over in the 12 Week Program
-Test Calendars How to prepare for finals or midterms and spread out the work without procrastination while building in time to meet with teachers and handle extra work.
-Active/Speed Reading How to read academic textbooks and outline them at the same time, so it is easy to go back and study. Your child will retain more while he/she reads…great for college!
-Reading Notes: Four different methods—depending on your child’s learning abilities, we will determine the best strategy for your child to take notes on reading to study from later.
-Basic Time Management: How to fill in the time planner with shorthand notes and do adequate planning for assignments and extra-curricular activities.
-The Homework System: This is my favorite thing to teach – How your child can start managing his/her papers and files to be more efficient and organized.
-Lightening the Backpack: Complete dump and re-organization of the backpack along with tips to keep it lighter (this includes switching out of some notebooks for spirals).
-Paper and Notebook Organization: Eliminating folder flaps, reorganizing dividers etc.
-College Prep Calendar: Filing out a timeline (best to start in 9th grade) for activities, paperwork and application building.
-Setting Up Awesome Study Spaces: Efficient places to do homework and studying, a very important issue to enhance performance in high school.
If you are interested in getting our package materials to find out more information or book a free consultation, please email us at: [email protected]!
Detailed Sample Lesson Plan:
Meeting 1:
-Student Questionnaire for us to get to know your child. This is where we make goals for our time together.
-Study Central: This lesson makes sure they have the proper tools, their desk, notebooks, backpack and locker are well organized. This is a good time to get them to think about their organization and provides many opportunities for the student and the TLM to bond and get to know each other and the student’s work habits.
-Planner: This is an essential lesson on how to use a planner or a calendar. The TLM and student go over how to prepare ahead for tests, quizzes and other different types of assessments and how to build in reminders.
Suggested Homework:
*Buy supplies
*Get goals and rewards approved by parents.
*Get teacher’s free period schedules, find school’s academic calendar, sync up planner with parent’s schedule as outlined per the Planner Lesson.
*Bring home all papers or old notebooks from school or around the house and leave them for next lesson.
Meeting 2:
-Continued Study Central (set-up the notebook system, organize new supplies)
-Finish setting up Planner with new schedules
-Regular Operating Procedures: This lesson helps students build more routines into their lives. We present 7 ROP’s including Sunday night homework assessment, Binder Clean-out ROP and morning routine ROP.
-School Central: Here we begin to talk about school strategies and study skills.
Meeting 3:
-Review how to make Lists Lesson: This lesson is particularly important for forgetful students.
-Start Vocab Roots for ERB’s and SAT: TLM’s will be teaching students numerous memorization techniques and learning vocab roots is a great way to practice and help student’s vocabulary and reading and writing.
-Do Dreamlining on Life Goals: Dreamlining is an exercise students do to think about bigger life goals and think about their own potential. It is the first step towards picking our personal project.
-Pick a Personal Project for College: All students will have a personal project while working with a TLM. Personal projects are meant to utilize new study skills, goal follow-through techniques and give students something to add or use later for resumes and college applications. An example of a personal project might be to do a neighborhood fundraiser for the local animal shelter for a pet-lover student or to write an ebook on HTML and safe online gaming for a gamer student. This improves their self-esteem, is a great learning tool and looks great down the line.
-Do How to Deal with Teachers Lesson: Learning to respect, respond and work well with teachers is essential to succeeding in school and developing good authority relationships.
Meeting 4: This lesson will give student’s tools to be better test takers. We go over how to study, prepare and take all the different types of tests with templates and how-to study guides.
-Pre-Test Checklist
-Study Tips for Tests
-Types of Tests
-Memory Hacks (perfect for language and/or history tests)
-Ways to Study (all types)
-Test Study Guide Template
-Finals Study Guide Template
The second part of the lesson is about procrastination (which often goes hand-in-hand with test taking) here we talk about time management and productivity through a number of week-long activities.
-Tackling Problems Lesson
-Productivity Lesson
-Productivity Worksheet and Productivity Log
-Do Procrastination Lesson
Meeting 5:
-Health: The health lesson covers how to balance sleep, food, time, fun and studying. Mostly, TLM’s will not be giving advice, but simply making their students aware of their own patterns and goals in each area.
-Sleep Log
-Workout Log
-Food Log
-Family and Room: Student’s who value their room and family time often do better in school and have better self-esteem. This lesson is designed to help students check-in with this area of their life and maintain balance.
-Morning ROS: Morning is almost always a war zone for families, this is a great regular operating system for the morning routine.
-Reality Relationships: We think it is extremely important for students to appreciate their parents, siblings and friends. This lesson teaches students about how to approach and handle problems with cliques, bullies, friends and all the relationships in their lives.
-Trigger Zones: Ever relationship, especially parental, has some areas of difficulty. This activity lets students become aware of the times when they have the most disagreements and how to stop the negative patterns.
-Teaching Teens to Be Grateful: Activity for teens on appreciation.
-Implement the Grade Tracker: We like students to keep track of their grades and get in the habit of reviewing every test quiz when they get it back.
-Note Taking lesson: Good note taking is an essential skill for school, college and life. Here we devise a system of note taking that is ideal for you child—most students do not realize that note taking should be personalized.
-Note Taking Exercise
-Book Shell: This is a template for students when they need to do book reports, or analyze books.
Meeting 6:
-Lifehacks: This lesson is filled with little tips to make life easier.
-Long-Term Project Worksheet: This teaches students how to manage long-term projects or goals by breaking things down into little steps and finding a starting point. Great for college applications!
-How to Handle Long-Term Projects:
-Travel Itinerary: We have found that more and more students are traveling on summer programs, during and for college trips and with families. We often leave them with some great packlists and tips for student travel.
-Pre-Travel Checklist:
-Travel Packlist 1:
-Travel Packlist 2:
-7 Day Event Planning: Students are also planning more fundraisers, school events, birthday parties etc, this is something they can keep in their cachet or worksheets for future use, also to teach students how much work goes into events.
-Active Reading: Teaching students how to be more efficient as they read and do homework.
-Reading Chart, Reading Chart sample
-Reading Exercise 1
-Learning Styles: Every student has a different learning style, here we go over some of the differences between auditory, visual and kinesthetic.
-Types of Intelligence Test
Meeting 7:
-Do any catch-up lessons
-Writing Tips: Writing is one of the major skills that we focus on with students. This is a long lesson with activities on how to write.
-Types of Papers:
-Review Paper Graph:
-Analyzing an Event Paper Graph:
-Writing Checklist
-Review Proper MLA Citations
-The Importance of Current Events Lesson: We often have students write sample papers for us. Therefore, we like to pair our writing lesson with the current events lesson on how students need to stay current on the world situation.
-500 Most Common Words: By this time during the 12 week program, students should be done memorizing the major roots. Now we focus on the 500 most common words in their foreign language.
Meeting 8:
-Catch-up on Lessons
-Go over Foreign Language Keyboard Shortcuts
-Go over Computer Hacks : We have a number of great computer tricks that we teach students for both safety, responsibility on the computer and efficiency.
-Go over Online Resources: We teach students how to recognize safe and legitimate websites as well as tips for social networking, shopping and doing research online. Here we give an awesome list of safe websites to use for school.
-Do Color Psychology: This is a fun lesson that lets students think about how they project their image to the world, respecting their bodies and looking professional.
Meeting 9:
-Do any Catch-up lessons
Grades 8 and above do:
-Preparing for College
-4 Year Planning Sheet
-My To-Do List for College
-Contact Correspondence Log
-Calendar Shell
-College Chart
-Campus Tour Shell and Example
-Financial Planning: We like to go over the basics of budgeting, financial responsibility and learning to value money.
-Budget
-Sample Check
-Sample Checkbook
-W-4
Meeting 10:
-Career Overview: This entire lesson goes over how to think about being a successful adult in a career they love.
-Career Success
-Business and Personal Networking
-Public Speaking
-Applying to Jobs
-Sample Resume
-Thank You Notes
Meeting 11:
-Finish all missed lessons!
-Going Green: This is a short lesson on the environment and small ways teens and students can make a difference.
-Types of Learning Test: This is a short test for students to recognize some of their strengths amongst the 7 types of intelligences such as intrapersonal, interpersonal, geometric and other strengths many teens have never heard of but can help them learn to leverage their strengths.
Meeting 12:
-Finish any undone Lessons
-Do Myers Brigg Test
-Do Asset and Liability Worksheet: This helps students really recognize their strengths and weaknesses, learn to accept them and use them to their advantage.
-Do Conclusion Assignment and Worksheet
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