5 Benefits of Earning College Credit in High School
by Christopher E. Nelson
How Teens can Make the Most of Summer Jobs
byKristina Cappetta
4 min to read
Statistics show that more teens are using their summer breaks to work, with nearly 40% of teens employed during the summer of 2021, making it the largest group since 2008. Whether it’s summer jobs for teens with no experience or a new job for your teen who works every summer, here are some tips to make the most out of summer jobs for teens.
How Teens can Make the Most of Summer Jobs
Build and Explore Career Skills
Summer jobs provide teens with a fantastic opportunity to explore different career paths and build skills. If your teen has no experience, they can use this summer job to learn the most they can about the field they are in.
This can be the best time find future mentors and begin making connections that can open doors down the road. Encourage your student to get contact information from their managers and coworkers to use for future internships or job-shadowing experiences.
Enhance Communication Skills
With many teens communicating over text and apps, the days of having face-to-face conversations are dwindling. Summer jobs for teens can help them learn how to effectively communicate their ideas to colleagues and supervisors and actively listen to others. These are skills they can use throughout their careers and in their everyday lives.
Develop Teamwork & Problem-Solving Skills
If their summer job involves working as part of a team or interacting with others in customer-service based jobs, your teen can use this experience to develop valuable teamwork and problem-solving skills. Teens can learn how to respect others and actively solve problems that may arise in the workplace.
Set Goals
What does your teen want to accomplish with their summer job? Why are they choosing that specific job? What do they hope to get out of it by the time school starts again? By having goals in mind each day, your teen can not only have a better focus, but also take advantage of everything the job has to offer.
For example, if your student wants to learn how to be a better leader, they may make it a goal to take on more responsibility when the chance arises or to work closely with their manager to see how they keep people working towards a unified goal.
Learn Financial Responsibility
Summer jobs for teens provide an excellent opportunity to teach financial literacy. By teaching teens about money now, you can help lay the foundation for their future financial success.
A summer job can help to teach these financial lessons:
Taxes
Many teens are surprised to learn how much of their paychecks go to taxes. Explain to them that a percentage of the money they earn goes directly to the government. Show them how to read their paystub so they can see exactly where their deducted money is going.
Saving & Budgeting
If your teen is saving for a large expense like a car or college, help them decide how much of their paycheck will go toward that fund and how much they will use for spending money. This will quickly show them that they may have to ease up on the “fun money” if they truly want to build their savings.
Build a Healthy Work Ethic
Teaching the importance of having a strong work ethic is something your teen can carry with them their entire lives. Instilling the importance of being on time and fully present while at work is extremely important when establishing a healthy work ethic. This includes not being distracted by text messages or social media while on the clock.
Part of creating a healthy work ethic is teaching your teen that their summer job comes with responsibility. They must fulfill their duties if they want to keep their job and their paycheck.
Teach Time Management Skills
Summer jobs help them to plan their work, create schedules, and how to allocate their time. Help them balance personal commitments and activities with the responsibility of a job. This instills discipline and can help them become more organized.
By learning how to manage their time, they can figure out how to have a positive work/life balance that allows them to earn a paycheck while having fun.
Once your teen is hired for the summer, use these tips to help them make the most out of their seasonal experience and use their learned skills to propel into a successful career.
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10 Computer Keyboard Shortcuts and Other Tips for Kids
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Students at every level and in every environment need to learn time-management skills. For online students, technology plays a huge role in managing time for virtual school tasks.
The basics of time management for online students come down to knowing how to navigate computers to access online and technology-based educational resources and how to sort them and the information they’ve gleaned from them. Today’s students must be able to type well, and then, to make their lives easier, they need to learn keyboard shortcuts for the most frequently used computer functions.
Below we offer some computer keyboard shortcuts to help your online or homeschool student get the most out of his or her time spent preparing for and participating in the online classroom.
Typing and Keyboard Practice for Kids
Let’s start with the computer basics for kids. TypingClub offers more than 600 lessons that teach touch-typing with the correct hand posture for every key. Its game structure and animated stories make lessons engaging and fun, and the student’s work is rewarded by stars, badges, and increasing levels of mastery to reach for. TypingClub computer lessons for kids are free, but a premium, ad-free version requires a fee.
Keyboard Shortcuts for Online Learning
Computer keyboard shortcuts are combinations of two or more keys that execute certain tasks that otherwise require a mouse-click on a menu link or some other type of input. Some are well-known, like Control (Ctrl) + C (Command or Cmd + C on a Mac) to copy highlighted text and save it to be pasted elsewhere with Ctrl + V or Cmd + V.
Shortcuts are timesavers for those who know them well enough to use them by second nature. Here is a printable pdf of 10 PC and Mac keyboard shortcuts every virtual school student should know for streamlining online schoolwork.
Once your student has become comfortable with the basic keyboard shortcuts, there are many more they can learn to save time and impress their friends in Microsoft Windows and for Apple’s Mac operating systems. Below, we’ve gathered 10 of our favorite keyboard shortcuts for staying organized.
10 Computer Keyboard Shortcuts for Better Organization
1. Win (Windows key) + E
Open File Explorer, a window that shows your frequently used folders, recently used files (and their locations), and a search box.
2. Ctrl + W
Close current window or document.
3. Alt + F4
Close current window or document.
4. Win + D
Minimize all windows open on the desktop. Press again to restore.
5. Ctrl + T
Open a new browser tab.
6. Ctrl + Shift + T
Reopen the most recently closed browser tab.
7. Win + T
Cycle through apps pinned to your task bar.
8. Alt + Tab
Show items open on your desktop and cycle through them. Alt + Shift + Tab will cycle backwards.
9. Alt + Esc
Cycle through open items in the order they were opened.
10. Win + Shift + Left/Right Arrow
Move the current window to the other monitor if you have multiple screens.
Sort Online Classes or Projects with Virtual Desktops
The truly busy online student can create one or more virtual desktops on their PC to establish a dedicated space for each class or project. Virtual desktops let you access all the notes, documents, apps, web pages, etc., pertaining to a specific topic or task with one keystroke instead of shuffling through windows to find them. It’s also a good way to separate schoolwork from, say, game or entertainment apps.
Add a virtual desktop to your PC with Win + Ctrl + D. Then switch back and forth between them with Win + Ctrl + Left/Right Arrow. Click the task view icon on your task bar to see your multiple desktops (and hop between them by clicking on them) and what’s open on the one that’s currently active. Here’s how to create virtual desktops on a Mac.
Having the proper tools makes any task easier, but knowing what the proper tools are capable of leads to efficiency. We cited just a few of the many computer keyboard shortcuts available to help make virtual school tasks more efficient. To help your student further increase their computer capabilities and confidence, check out these seven computer skills your child should master by the time he or she starts virtual high school.
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