This is a basic guide on how to tune a guitar.
Topics covered are:
Clip on Tuners
Tuner Apps
Guitars need to be tuned every single time they are played. Sometimes they'll be fine still or may just need a little tweak, but very often they'll have taken a slight knock in transport or when being carried around, especially in a busy school environment.
This is why the first thing I do in lessons is to get the older students to tune their guitars or tune the younger children's myself.
Why is it so important?
Not only because otherwise the piece being played will just sound wrong (and most likely awful), but because your child will also be very quickly training their ear to the notes they are playing. If these are different each time, this becomes impossible.
The strings from thickest to thinnest are:
E, A, D, G, B, E
Hear are a couple of useful mnemonics to help us remember:
Elephants And Donkeys Grow Big Ears
Eddie Ate Dynamite Good Bye Eddie