Summer 2021 is coming to an end after a (VERY) long school year! Many families needed this summer, more than ever, for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, it was a chance to decompress after what many experienced as a unique year. The question now is, is your child ready to go back to school? Preparing your child(ren) for the coming school year after some just spent almost a year and six months in and out of school can be a process. For others, resuming school is exciting, to be with friends again and see their beloved teachers or to be in school, but some have concerns about what the school year would be like again. At the end of any typical summer, parents begin back-to-school preparation for new classes, possibly a new school, and the fun part of buying back-to-school supplies.
This experience can bring on a great wave of different emotions that may include excitement, joy, some anxiety, or the concern of the unknown. Overall there are three primary ways to start off a successful school year: Confidence, Social Well-being, and Academics.
The First 6 weeks of school determine how your child will blossom during their school year
Parents, tutors, teachers lay the groudwork to support children to thier sucess. Let’s talk through different ways to prepare our children for a successful transition into the new school year.
Prepare for the New School Year with Confience
Confidence is a vital tool for children to succeed both academically and Social-Emotional coming into the new school year. Emotional challenges can make it hard for your child to adjust to the new school year. Different children respond differently to new situations, and parents may need individual emotional preps for each child.
There are many ways to build confidence in a child, especially at the start of the school year. Depending on the age, cultural background, maturity, and environment of each child. Our team collected the top 4 ways to build confidence in any child.
Tools for Building Confidence
A key to confidence-building is first knowing your physical environment around you. Getting to know the unknowns out of the way, like meeting the new teacher before the first day of school, seeing what the hall, lunchroom, and yard looks like, or just walking around the campus first with mom and dad, can create an enormous sense of relief for some children.
Some need daily pep talks and encouragement to handle big feelings they may experience while at school and be reminded that all big feelings are temporary. Offer friendly suggestions for the class to your child’s teacher, like a “Family Wall” for your child’s classroom in the young graders or a “Cool Experience Wall” for your older child’s classroom that includes pictures such as cool skateboarding tricks.
Others will build their confidence by meeting new classmates on playdates before the first day of school with other kids your child may not know in class will foster new relationships and experiences or a meet-up for your older children.
Discuss routines and use visuals of what that routine looks like for the family as a whole. Last, talk it out with your child on a fun date night for ice cream and just let them talk and vent with no advice from mom or dad just expressing themselves but circle back a few days later and bring up the topic with solutions.
Social Well-Being
Start the New School Year by Socially Thriving and Well-Being
All about Practice
Socially thriving takes practice especially coming into a new school year! It can significantly support your child’s experience or quickly create a hindrance in adjusting to the new school year.
Tools for Building Social Well-Being
Be a listening ear! Listening ears from their parent is a primary source to understand their day-to-day life experiences at school. Parents often ofter up questions to probe conversation, but in truth, with children sitting at their table and coloring with them and allowing the freedom of what may seem like random talk leaves to honest dialogue and what every day is like for them. Like us adults, children want their own independent experiences away from their parents, but how do you measure if they are thriving at school socially. For example, when a child talks about losing friends or gaining friends, that is a massive indication of their social well-being. The most challenging aspect of making room for your child to grow socially is to know when to step in and when to allow the threshold to self-manage. According to experts, most children learn to make friends, and the process is healthy for them when it may be difficult for a bit, but our relationships enrich our lives and make for a happier life. You can improve your child’s social life by teaching them how to socialize through examples of your own.
Be our child’s social example! We play many roles in our child’s life, including maintaining our relationships in our lives. Creating social well-being for ourselves may be our first step to shape our child’s social experiences. Especially us moms, we forget that coffee date with a good friend is vital for our own experiences. When they see us making our relationship part of our lives, they inherently understand that friendship has value. Be a conversation starter; this plays a significant role in showing your child how to start a new friendship and that breaking the ice and eventually creating new friends is not all that hard and actaully joyful.
We are relationship-based tutoring and SEL Kids Life Coaching company, and rapport with our students is first and foremost to bring academic success. By fully engaging with our students and showing genuine interest in their lives, welfare, and backgrounds. At Kids in the Yard, we create an environment that encourages students and parents to work together and share information, improving your child’s social abilities.
As a parent, the end goal is to equip our children with the tools to build and sustain filled relationships that may last a lifetime. If we look at our circle of friends, we still have those from our childhood. There’s just something about making friends in our primary school years!
Prepare for the New School Year with Acdemic Success
All about Meeting New Faces
A new school year means getting to a new class environment and meeting a new teacher. This experience may be a smooth transition for some students, but it may be pretty challenging for others. Getting to know a new teacher for school-aged children takes time like any relationship, but it’s also crucial to academic success and well-being.
Children typically develop bonds once they become familiar with their teachers as they interact and learn daily. Until that moment arises, it’s essential that your child stays open-minded and adjusts to a new setting. They, therefore, may be uncomfortable familiarizing themselves with a new teacher, but that’s a natural process if your child has experienced some academic challenges in the previous school year when transiting to a new school year, they most like will carry that over.
It’s best to allow a fresh start no matter where they are with a new teacher. The best remedy is to be straightforward with their reactions about their new teacher. The focus is to learn from this educator and either grow to appreciate each other or create an excellent new relationship.
Let us not forget all the new faces we will meet on the School Yard, and in the lunchroom, or on the bus.
Final Thought
Our core values at Kids on the Yard are to hone a culture of strength, resiliency, kind, emotional expressions for themselves and others, and a sense of community. In addition, we are guided by the understanding that both children and adults should live joyous and fulfilling lives. As such, we are keen to understand your child’s source of stress when beginning a new school year.
The four elements to the success of a child’s during the first 6 weeks of school are:
- Confidance
- Socially Well-Being
- Acdemic Success
- Educational Jump Start
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