The summer is finally ending, marking the start of a new school year. As a parent, you should prepare your children before the school season to boost their academic experience. The early preparations will also create some spare time for soaking up the last days of summer. If you are still trying to figure out where to start, here are tips to help you prepare your children for the new school year.
Help Your Children Cope With Their Fears And Anxiety
When Transitioning to a new school year, it’s normal for kids to worry about the changes in their friends, academic workload, teachers, living environment, and social setups. However, as a parent, you can always help your children remain optimistic about resuming school by:
Lending Them a Listening Ear
Children face different worries and frustrations. As a guardian, acting as a safe place where they can bring their fears and frustrations to light can melt their anxiety away. One way of achieving that is by asking the children about their expectations in their new school year and how well they are prepared to tackle them.
Remember, your goal here is to offer a compassionate ear and help them realize their inner resources and how well they can utilize them to overcome their challenges. Also, it would educate them about their outer resources like teachers, parents, friends, etc., and how helpful they can be in fighting their school anxiety.
Organize Playdates
Another way to reduce the school anxiety in your kids while soaking up the last days of summer is scheduling play dates with their schoolmates. Letting your kids play with other kids is an excellent way of easing their fears and strengthening their ties before the school year begins. Examples of great summer games you can prepare for the kids during the play dates include bicycle riding, axe throwing, fishing, and bowling.
Plan a back-to-school party
If your children are not more into sports, then why not prepare them for a back-to-school party? Indeed, a back-to-school party will help them reconnect with their classmates, teachers, and other school stakeholders before the year begins. It will also tune their minds to the school’s mood. To make the most of it, hire a local entertainment company to help with the arrangements and execution of party events.
Find Them A Reliable Accommodation
Every parent must ensure their children access quality education. One way to fulfill this responsibility is to ensure your children live comfortably by finding quality accommodation. When choosing accommodation for your kids, you must choose between home and student rentals.
Living at home can be the perfect option if your kids are enrolled in a local school, and you want to cut rent and utility costs. Also, home accommodation will allow for efficient monitoring if the child suffers from a chronic condition. The only drawback is that your kids will be separated from student life, and making friends away from the social hub of student houses and hubs will be hard.
On the other hand, student rental is the ultimate option if you want your child to live independently. It involves securing rented accommodation in institution-provided residence halls, privately owned halls, or privately rented accommodation.
Talking halls of residence, we mean a large block with individually furnished bedrooms, a shared kitchen, and bathrooms organized around corridors. They may be managed by the learning institution or the learning institution in partnership with a private company.
Halls of residence offer an excellent way for kids to connect to the student community from day one. They also give your kids quick access to study resources from the school.
Another accommodation option for your children is a private rented house. Typically, most private student rentals host approximately four to five people. They are ideal for college students who can live independently. This option allows your child to choose the type of friends to move in with and live wherever they like.
Help Your Child Familiarize With the School
As the new school year begins, most scholars expect to move on to the next grade or to join the next level. While the transition might seem exciting, it can be coupled with significant emotional discomfort as students adjust to the new learning environments, new teachers, responsibilities, and friends.
However, the good news is that you can spare them the discomfort by helping them familiarize themselves with the school. Below are some tips to help you.
Share about Their New Responsibilities
Now that your child is moving to a new grade, talking to them about the recent changes in their responsibilities will help them stay prepared. Suppose your kid is transitioning from elementary school to public middle school. In that case, hiring an experienced tutor to enlighten them on the changes they will likely experience and how to overcome them can help them beat their fears and appreciate the changes.
Leveraging Orientation Opportunities
Most schools organize orientation sessions to let new students meet with the older students, school staff and learn how things work at their new school. Taking advantage of these opportunities can help in shading off the fears and anxiety which might be taking a toll on your child’s mind.
Facilitate Your Kid’s Bonding With The Teacher
Many kids, especially those at the elementary level, want to be familiar with the teacher to feel comfortable in class. And some kids won’t be ready to learn until they feel connected. While soaking up the last days of summer is a great experience, scheduling some time for a student-teacher meet-up makes sense, too.
Schedule Back To School Dental Checkups
As children start their school year, they face new classes, tight schedules, and other encounters that limit their time for maintaining their dental hygiene. This allows the sneaky tooth decay to develop, interfering with their learning.
One way to ensure your kids enjoy undistracted learning is scheduling regular dental checkups with a family dentist. How will dental checkups enhance your kids learning?
They Help In Early Detection And Prevention
Going for oral exams allows dentists to identify and treat potential dental problems in your child before they become problematic. With early detection and prevention, your child will be secure from pain, troubled speech, poor smile, trouble eating, and school absence that would otherwise have resulted if the problem was left untreated. Besides, scheduling back-to-school dental checkups allows the dentists to advise the kids about:
- The dangers of school vending machines to their teeth
- The foods that support dental hygiene
- How busy students can maintain their oral hygiene amidst school pressure, obligations, and distractions
- How to respond to dental injuries
Improves Your Child’s Quality Of Life
Additionally, taking your children for oral checkups will enhance their oral wellness perspective. In other words, children who go for regular dental exams early are more likely to uphold dental care in the future, improving their quality of life.
As you can see, scheduling a dental checkup with a qualified dentist has numerous benefits. If you don’t have a family dentist, you should find one to provide preventive dental care for your children and the rest of your family before you start soaking up the last days of summer.
Find A Local Urgent Care Clinic
Kids are prone to both acute and chronic illnesses. And their illnesses or accidents may happen during odd hours when their regular care office is closed. In that case, an urgent care clinic can provide the necessary diagnosis and treatment to help your child recover their wellness and resume their school life. So, locating an urgent care facility should be a priority when soaking up the last days of summer.
Are you still contemplating finding one? Unlike emergency clinics, urgent care facilities offer quicker care and wellness monitoring for children suffering from non-life-threatening conditions. So you don’t have to worry about the long waiting times associated with emergency clinics.
Additionally, the centers feature a qualified staff who can diagnose and treat numerous health conditions, including neuromuscular, musculoskeletal, physiological, dental, and psychological problems. As such, you can rest assured that your patient is in good hands. To get the most benefits, your urgent care facility must:
- Be available in late evenings and weekends, when most regular clinics are closed
- Have board-certified pediatricians and specially trained practitioners
- Be affordable and time conscious
- Be willing to coordinate with your child’s primary care practitioner and offer the necessary follow-up care
- Own the latest medical technology
- Be close to the studying institution for your children
Reward Them for Their Past Year’s Achievements
Children need motivation to face the new academic year with determination and to enhance their productivity. One sure way to motivate them is by rewarding them for their past school achievements to encourage them to maintain their performance or perfect their mistakes in their previous academic period. Below are some gift ideas to start with.
Let Them Pick Their Favorite School Supplies
Going out for school shopping will motivate your child and make them positively inclined to resume studies. On the other hand, letting them pick their favorite items will make them feel important.
In addition to the shopping, you can include a surprise gift like a diamond ear ring as an appreciation for their excellent school performance. Even if your child is not performing academically, such a gift can motivate them to change for the better.
Getting Them Carhartt Pants
Carhartt clothing is known for keeping the body warm during chilly weather. Given that the next school season encompasses the late fall and winter months, it makes sense to gift your children with Carhartt pants. Ensure your gift is accompanied by a special note like, ‘You deserve all good things for your excellent performance in school,’ to motivate them to work harder.
You can issue the gift during the back-to-school bash or any other activity you might have listed in your to-do list for soaking up the last days of summer.
Schedule For Comprehensive Eye Exam
Children face increasing demands for their visual abilities as they learn. For instance, the print font size becomes tinier, and the time spent reading the printouts increases significantly as they progress with learning. That is why scheduling a comprehensive eye exam with an optometrist should come first on your to-do list for soaking up the last days of summer.
A professional eye doctor will assess whether your child’s eyes possess the necessary vision skills for effective learning. Examples of these skills include:
Visual Acuity
Visual acuity measures the eye’s ability to differentiate between shapes and object details at a predetermined distance. This test can help determine if your child can see a chalkboard.
Eye Teaming
This measures the eyes’ ability to work together in a coordinated manner. A child with poor eye teaming lacks sustained and comfortable vision and has problems with depth perception.
Eye Focusing
Eye focusing measures the eye’s ability to maintain accurate vision after an abrupt change in objects, such as when copying from a chalkboard to paper on the table and back. The other eye skills that your optometrist may assess in your kids include eye-hand coordination, eye tracking, and visual perception.
Besides testing eye skills, they can test for eye diseases such as glaucoma, cataracts, and endophthalmitis and recommend a solution. For instance, If your condition requires vision assistance such as eye contacts or eyeglasses, they will prescribe and suggest the best eyeglass store in the locality.
Create a Clean Learning Space
Another vital project to consider when soaking up the last days of summer is creating a healthy learning space for your kids. Creating a dedicated learning space at home for your kids will enhance their creativity, improve their focus on class work and ultimately boost their school performance. And the good news is that you can always work with them to set up one using the following steps.
Identify And Clean The Target Space
Locate a spacious area where you intend to install the learning amenities. The site must have access to natural lighting to create the perfect learning experience. If your space feels congested, it might be the right time to dump the unwanted items or dispose of them by listing them on sites promoting used instruments for sale.
Install Furniture and Learning Amenities
Find comfortable seating, a sturdy table, and bookshelves, and assemble the learning amenities to give your kids a seamless learning experience. Also, provide resources that promote hands-on activities to trigger self-directed learning in your kids.
Need help determining what resources to avail? Think of resources for music, games, puzzles, writing, and anything else that promotes self-directed learning in children.
Keep Things Organized
Children require clean, safe, organized space to focus on their studies. So, it would help if you kept their area de-cluttered and clean to achieve the most. Use storage bin boxes to keep the play tools and study materials organized. Be sure to label the storage units to let the kids choose what they want to learn or play with.
Final Words
There are various ways of soaking up the last days of summer for a memorable experience. For instance, you can take a quick trip to the beach, a road trip, or throw an end-of-summer party. On the same note, if you have some school-going children, you should set aside time to prepare them for the new school year.
Our guide outlines the best tips for preparing your kids for the new school season. It’s your turn to implement them to give your kids an unparalleled learning experience.
