How to help kids succeed in school is always a great concern for educators, parents, and students. In many countries, homework is considered as a solution to this problem since homework is an additional essential part of classroom learning. It helps to consolidate the knowledge that a child has learned in school. As a result, this helps them to gain a deeper understanding and broaden their knowledge. However, to gain sufficient necessary skills for real life, homework is not enough. Beside the time for doing homework, children should be encouraged to do other activities to complete yourself. The below is several things your kids should be doing instead of homework.
- Doing Housework With Parents
Parents should have your kids do homework that is suitable with their strengths, so that children can understand their parent’s struggles, love their parents more, and learn more useful skills like cooking, cleaning, and caring for the family. Helping parents set the table after eating, or disposing of rubbish is the small activity parents can let their children do. On the surface, these things appear to be very small but they provide valuable lessons about the life parents need to teach their kids. Each such lesson carries a sense of responsibility. Besides, although it is simple help, children can learn the importance of contributing to a good thing. Children also understand how important adherence to a daily schedule is. Housework will enable children to prepare for the tasks they will have to complete later. As a result, when living independently, kids can look after themselves better.
- Doing Exercise
Today’s children are more interested in playing electronic games than in outdoor sports. This is not good. Being lazy will cause their muscles and bones not to develop at all levels and have a lasting effect on the health. Besides, athletic and physical activities also help to develop both constitution and mentality, at the same time, bring positive emotions, confidence and a healthy lifestyle for the child. It helps increase metabolism and blood circulation as well. This is important, because blood transports oxygen and nutrients to every cell of the body. Regular physical activity enhances the cardiovascular system of children so that they will become healthier and more flexible, both physically and mentally. In addition, the concentration of children will increase, thereby helping children learn better. Dr Stewart Vella of the University Of Wollongong, Australia, said: “The benefits of exercise are important and the more children exercise, the better marks they can get.” A 40-minute workout every day will help develop children’s cognition and ability to learn effectively. Therefore, parents should encourage children to take exercise frequently or do with them. 
- Playing Sports
Similar to doing exercise, playing sports also help kids become stronger or in other words, enhance kids’ health. In addition, playing sports brings an abundance of other benefits for kids. Firstly, sports helps children improve their motor skills such as the combination between hands, eyes, feet, and other body parts, which assists kids in controlling their body better and building confidence when walking or behaving. Playing sports can help children develop positive behaviors such as striving, fair competing, getting along with team-mates and socializing as well as nice characteristics such as persistence, honesty, censure, good behavior when winning or losing. Some tactical sports such as soccer also help children to train their minds and develop their confidence in the most natural way that is suitable for their age. Besides, sports make children happy and stick with the family more. Researchers around the world have shown that sports help boost blood and oxygen levels in the brain, while also increasing the levels of norepinephrine and endorphins, which play an important role in reducing stress. Therefore, children will usually eat and sleep better, be optimistic and have much fun. Sports activities also support children to learn how to balance their life and move towards positive thoughts. With the fun and excitement of sports, children will nurture their love for some sports to maintain a long-lasting healthy lifestyle. Furthermore, sports activities are also a great way for both of all family members to share great moments together while playing a sport or cheering for family members in a certain tournament. Dr. Stewart Vella of the University of Wollongong, Australia, said: “The benefits of exercise are important and the more you exercise, the better your students will be.” A 40-minute workout every day will help develop children’s cognition and ability to learn effectively. 
- Reading Books
The more reading books, the more children acquire knowledge that is the key to every problem in life. Reading books can be considered as one step to success in the future and prepare for your children’s future. Reading a variety of books provide children with more opportunities to get more information. Various topics help children broaden their knowledge range and acquire necessary life skills. Besides, whether parents talk to their children daily, the vocabulary they use is limited and repetitive. Reading books helps children learn faster with vocabulary in a variety of areas. That means they can know phrases or sentences that do not appear in their daily life. For children who interact with more than one language, reading is a simpler way to improve their language skills and proficiency. Reading also affects children’s brain and can help them develop their need for support and enhance their reading skills, at the same time improving kids’ concentrating ability. In particular, reading helps children develop imagination and creativity. This is one of the most important benefits of reading. When children enjoy a book, they will imagine the characters in it and predict what is going to happen next. Moreover, reading also helps children to develop empathy when they put themselves into the stories. They identify the characters and feel what the characters feel. As a result, children can promote and understand more different emotions. What is more, while there are many electronic devices and technologies, it is difficult to deny their attractiveness. TVs, video games, smartphones or applications are very popular with children and they tend to addict to these devices. Therefore, encouraging children to read books both help them keep away from electronic devices and provide them an extremely useful mean of entertainment. Hence, parents should buy many books suitable for kids or take them to bookstores or libraries so that children can choose the books they would like to read. In the case of kids who have not read yet, parents can tell them.
- Participating In Community Activities
Community activities are a part of the civic responsibility. These are the activities that children want to participate in, not activities that force them to participate. When taking part in community activities actively, children will have chances to perform their civic responsibility. Parents can involve their children in activities such as cleaning, helping the elderly, or volunteering with your parents. At the same time, children have more awareness of the world around them. They will directly interact with their peers and positive adult models. Engaging and coordinating with adults help kids understand the real world in many different ways. For example, your family follows a certain religion or no religion, but when kids come in contact with people who follow different religions through some charitable activity, for example, kids will have new ways of bringing religious faith to reality through good deeds for others. Besides, engaging in community activities helps children have positive ways to recognize themselves. As a result, kids can recognize the good or the bad person, the positive or the negative side. Furthermore, it also helps kids to build a connection with the local community and society, which can provide children with the necessary social skills. Community activities give children the opportunity to apply the skills they have. For example, children can use the skills in helping housework learned at home to assist other people. When kids are involved in community activities, they can easily manage their free time and balance entertaining, working and studying time. As well as motivate them to do more organized things and manage their time more effectively.
What is more, social activities make children feel more confident and improve physical and mental health. In more detail, with more confidence, they can learn to solve challenges, communicate with people around them, build life skills, and be able to work in a dynamic environment. This is also good for children to form awareness. According to psychology, children’s participation in community activities is a positive way for children to have positive feelings, which protect children from sadness, depression and at the same time keep children far away from autism which the countless number of children catch. Thus, it is also the foundation for mental and physical training for children. Parents can search for community activity clubs that are suitable for their kids’ age to engage them in and sometimes join them to see their improvement and give them compliment. 
- Watching Favorite TV Shows
Watching favorite TV shows that are suitable for kids’ age is a great mean of entertainment. Children can relieve their stress or pressure after school by enjoying their favorite shows. Besides, TV shows are also beneficial for kids’ development. For the reason, there are a variety of topics on TV show, via which children can learn many things. For example, if they watch the show about wildlife or animals, they can know diverse species of animals and trees, learn how they can survive in nature, or how they fight with enemies and protect fellows, and so on. As a result, children can acquire a part of natural and social knowledge very well. Another example, when children watch a show like “the voice” or “master chef,” they may be inspired and find their passion for these fields. Thus, in fact, there are many things children can learn not from their parents, not from their people around but from television. Therefore, parents should allow their kids watch their favorite TV shows with positive contents in the right amount of time.
- Planting A Garden
Planting a garden or only several trees or flowers is also a great thing children can do instead of homework. Besides the benefits of bringing fresh air, this activity provides children interesting knowledge about biology and develops the skills of planting. Moreover, children will love nature more or establish a sense of protection of nature. At the same time, planting is also a good way to relax and keep children stay away useless activities. 
- Playing Video Games
Playing video games is not totally bad, it is harmful only when kids play improperly games or play for a long time. Actually, playing video games also brings children with many benefits. Video games are considered to be the “favorite” of many children; it can help children to maximize the important skills in life. Firstly, it helps kids be smarter. Australian research suggests that games that require proactive actions will help children be smarter by improving problem-solving ability and encouraging kids to brainstorm. With the mentality of “winning” in video games, children have to focus on and think of ways to do it well, which will give them the habit of self-confidence and effort, when encountering a difficult problem. Secondly, it helps children to shape behaviors with people around. When playing together with other children, they will integrate, close, share, and know how to dialogue, at the same time give children the patience, respect for others, and know how to negotiate. Furthermore, playing video games also helps children develop creativity. Research by scientists indicates that playing video games will help children develop creative thinking and create psychological comfort, confidence when making their own decisions and opinions. Simultaneously, this activity helps to improve a child’s reading ability. With young children beginning reading, the difficulty encountered when reading is due to lack of focus and visual impairment but a language problem. Playing electronic games enables children raise their visual attention. What is more, in general, all children like video games since they always feel relaxed and excited as well as have much fun when playing them. Therefore, parents should allow their kids to play some video games that are suitable for their age in a proper environment, which will help their kids entertain, even improve their scores at school.
- Traveling
Life in the family and under the umbrella of the parent is completely different from outside life. If children rarely go out to explore the world, they will find it hard to adjust to independent life later. Therefore, letting children travel is the opportunity for them to adapt quickly to the new environment. This is very helpful when they become an adult. When traveling, children will experience a lot of places and many things. As a result, children also develop better thinking skills. Frequent travel experience is a key factor in determining the future of young adults. As adults, there are issues that need looking beyond. Thus, for the life too narrow in the family and school will cause children to “lost” in thinking. However, when traveling in many places, expanding knowledge about people, society and life, children will develop thinking, linking good problems and have a farther perspective.
Those activities are essential for all children for the reason that they will complete kids with many skills for both school and real life. Of course, kids cannot be aware of how much these activities are beneficial to them. Thus, parents are the leading ones. To bring the best benefits for kids, parents should find out the proper places and topics and distribute the right time for kids to implement these activities. Hope that with the sharing, children will develop in the best way and can gain more success in the future real life. 
Author Bio:
This guest post is by Emily Pham, a blogger with many years of experience in searching the best natural home remedies for beauty and health issues.