Ann Dolin: Hi! My name is Ann Dolin, I am a President and Founder of Educational Connections in in-home tutoring service in the Washington D.

C area. Today we are going to talk about all of the issues surrounding homework from helping your disorganized child to working with students who avoid homework, procrastinate, fidget and can be emotional during the time they have after school to complete their work.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself before we get started. I have a Bachelors Degree in Elementary Ed and Child Psychology and a Masters Degree in Special Education. After my years in the classroom as both the General Education and Special Education teacher, I started Educational Connections 10 years ago, and at the time our tutors mainly work with students in content areas, meaning we helped with math or we helped students to acquire better reading skills, but over the past four or five years I have seen a major turn in my business and a lot of what we do now is helping students with bigger picture skills, organization, time management, and study skills and these abilities are called Executive Functioning Skills.

Many of our students struggle in these areas, they are bright kids, but they have difficulty organizing, prioritizing, knowing what to do first, planning for long-term assignments, and sustaining focus to get it all done.

The tips that I am going to share with you today are targeted specifically at students who may have weaknesses in these areas, but there are certain things we can do as parents to help them overcome these issues. The information I am going to share with you today is from my Trademarked Educational Coaching process as well as from my book, Homework made simple.

So let's get started in helping you, help your child to make homework a better experience.