COLOR-CODING Your child can use an inexpensive set of eight magic markers for much more than coloring between the lines. Bright kids with nontraditional learning styles can often benefit from the hands-on engagement and visual cues that color-coding provides. Help your son or daughter break study tasks and notes into manageable chunks using a simple system they create themselves. For example, after printing out a few Internet articles for a research paper on otters, a simple key can be devised. Use green to mark information on diet, red for habitat, yellow for life cycle, and so on. After reading and color-coding each article, the information will be a snap to synthesize and reassemble into a report or story. Obviously, this system works just as well across grade levels. Maybe your high school student needs to analyze a poem. The strategy remains the same, but the categories change: green for imagery; red for rhymes; yellow for symbols; etc. Color-coding can even be applied to math problems or science projects. Nearly all academic tasks require some sort of cognitive activity that lends itself to color-coding. Be on the lookout for assignments that require analyzing, sorting and synthesizing. Your student should be actively involved in establishing the categories. While a parent can help determine what these should be, resist the impulse to supply the categories without a discussion. It may take a little longer for your child to help select them, but the end result will be that your child has been compelled to formulate in his or her own mind some framework for processing the material. Once color-coding becomes a habit, more and more applications will present themselves. Your son or daughter may begin to prioritize study tasks, label the order of operations in a math problem, or recognize issues of agreement between subject and verb. Sharing these simple ideas with your children may inspire them to create their own personalized systems to organize and accent their work. Watching them become invested in the process and empowered to succeed is when you know that the markers really are magic! By Emmet Rosenfeld