Seton Home Study School Study Skills Online

You must eliminate distractions. For a couple of weeks, make a list of the distractions that interfered with your studying. Try to figure out how to eject, shut out, dispel, exclude each one. Ask your mother and father to help you to oust distractions. A good student controls the situation, removes possible distractions. Students in a classroom are forced to focus on their studies as they are confined in a classroom, but students at home need more will power to keep distractions away during study time. Many home school students admit this is the hardest part of home schooling. Some high school students go to the local college library for a couple of hours a day to avoid distractions.

Find a location in your home where you will not have the distractions. Your dad might enclose a corner in your basement or attic or bedroom for a study room for you. Have your parents look for an inexpensive study carrel. Consider building a study carrel.

  Most common distractions: 

• Phone and emails - You cannot take phone calls, make phone calls, send emails, take emails, or other similar activities during your scheduled study time.

• New phones - allow texting, emails, playing games, surfing the web, & other dangers to serious study time.

• Computer - Use without the internet, except in common room or dining room.

• Food - Set up a schedule to eat before or after your studying time, not during.

• Household noises - play background instrumental music to dispel sounds.

• Outside Activities - Limit these to specific non-study times.

• Google - Can be useful but don't keep searching; first two pages usually enough.

• You Tube - Usually not useful. Stay off it.

• Facebook - Not useful. Waste of time. Stay off it.

• Blogging - Stay off it.

• Music - Careful. Studies say that 30% of teens are developing hearing loss due to the use of ear buds or ear phones directly against the ears. Check studies on the internet; be careful, protect your hearing.

• Socialization - Not effective for studying, unless there is an adult supervisor.

• Video Games - Stay away from them. Addicting. Waste of time.

• Chat Rooms - Stay away, waste of time.

          Next: Lesson 8.