Get the Kids Ready for Back to School With These Tips

Making the transition back-to-school is a tough time for kids. As summer is winding down slowly but surely, it’s just the right time to get the children ready for a new school year. However, buying notebooks and looking for the best deals on school items is not the real challenge. There are less tangible things that can make this yearly transition difficult for both kids and parents. Here are some tips to help you ease back-to-school butterflies for the young ones:

 

• Reinstate the school-night routine a few weeks before school starts. It is the most important part of the transition as it basically resets your children to their school schedule, which is the part where they have the hardest time adapting to. That involves establishing a new bedtime, the same every day, that will allow them to get enough sleep so they feel ready to learn and well-rested in the morning. You also need to wake them up at the same time every day as if they had to go to school. Again, the kids totally hate this part, but you can’t avoid it if you want them to be anything else but zombies when they get back to school.

 

• The next step is to keep them busy with activities in the morning, something that is enticing and doesn’t let them sit on the couch and play on their smart phone or tablet all day. Getting them to leave the house in the morning and engaging them in outside activities will help. It’s not always easy, especially if you are a working parent. However, your efforts in planning these activities and getting them out of the house will pay off when the school season starts. It will also be a gradual transition versus a sudden change.

 

• Although eating a healthy breakfast is very important for kids, sometimes breakfast becomes lunch during the summer because they no longer wake up at reasonable breakfast times. Plus, when they are on summer holidays, parents tend to allow kids to indulge in less healthy foods for breakfast. It’s like a reward for all the hard work they’ve been doing over the school year. School  is almost here, so getting them back into the routine of a healthy breakfast will make things much easier once school starts.

 

• When summer starts, kids seem to erase from their memory anything that has to do with school: home room and classroom numbers, bus driver’s names, locker combinations, when lunch starts and when it ends, etc. So you may have to reset their minds into a school-like state where they need to get use to the school season again. Remember that every kid is on his own once the classroom door shuts and that means that your kids will need to learn how to manage a lot of things on his own again. A great way to get them ready for the independence that’s about to come  is to talk with them ahead of time about their responsibilities once they get back to school.

What do you do to get your kids ready for back to school?

Picture by Andrew Kolb