Spring is upon us with all its splendor - and its requisite responsibilities. Winding up the current school year and making summer plans for your family can often make you feel like your plate is overflowing or your head is exploding. Read on for more information to help you prioritize and set beneficial and realistic goals. And remember - what you model is what your child sees. Embracing a "less is more" philosophy not only makes for a more chill and more effective you, it's really good for your child's peace of mind and work ethic as well.

Learn about research-based strategies your child can employ to prioritize and better learn important information when they study. Dr. Daniel T. Willingham, psychologist and author of “Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy” writes about how to study in ways that result in true learning.

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When students begin to plan, monitor, and evaluate their learning, they develop self-regulation and can set and meet more ambitious goals.

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Leila Smiley, head of Smart City Tutors, highlights the importance of prioritization to all SCT tutors. Says Leila, "We zero in on executive functioning principles - which are all about finding effective ways to organize and prioritize information in our brains - in all our work with students. I was recently working with a student studying vocabulary, and I taught her a strategy for learning new words. Instead of the old school technique of reading and rereading the list, I encouraged her to come up with fun associations and stories to connect each word with its definition, and she was stunned how easy it made memorization for her! There are an abundance of similar effective techniques students can employ to help their brains sift through information and retain what's most important."