In this issue: activities to help your family keep minds sharp and prevent the “summer slide” for students, including ideas for preparing for school, including school planner resources.

In this week’s issue of the Family Guide, the FRCS Learning Specialists team up to provide some suggestions for getting ready for a great school year!

This issue brought to you by Lia Wiersma, Cathy Van Donselaar, and Leah Pirozzi

Let’s Get Ready for a Great School Year!

Shifting from summer mode back to school is always a crucial, exciting and somewhat stressful time for students, parents and teachers — and this year, we face some unique challenges. It’s natural to feel a little anxious or even overwhelmed as we contemplate the back-to-school rush in these days of COVID-19. Let’s start getting these feelings and thoughts out into the open, so we can all make a good transition to a great school year.

• We’ve been at home for a long time! It’s going to take extra time and patience to remember our school-day routines when we’ve been at home twice as long as a typical summer.
• We’ve been avoiding crowds and busy places in an effort to stay safe. Now, we need to start venturing out, so it’s natural for your child to wonder, “Am I still safe?” Know that FRCS is prioritizing student safety and taking great care to follow state and county guidelines.
• Many things have changed: masks and movement around campus, new plexiglass, new procedures! It’s going to feel a little strange and unfamiliar at first.
• But many important things have not changed! Students at FRCS are still known and loved by their teachers. We all have the capacity to learn new daily grooves. We still have a big, beautiful world to explore and learn about. Most importantly, we are still in the hands of our heavenly Father, who watches — intently and lovingly — over every detail of our lives.

TIPS TO GUIDE YOUR FAMILY THROUGH THE NEXT FEW WEEKS:

1. Take time to become familiar with the new protocols and procedures we’ll be using at school. Considering your child’s age and maturity, decide how much to share with them (vs. how much you as parent will simply manage for them).
2. How parents talk about coming changes will have a big impact on how children feel about those changes. Take care to frame your words in positive, hopeful terms. Children often reflect and magnify parental emotions; if you are anxious, your child will be anxious! Talk openly but positively about changes to come.
3. It’s okay to take this transition slowly, and be patient with unexpected bumps along the way. Discuss the organizational strategies you will need to have in place (ideas below). Plan a nice family cookout, campfire, or hike to commemorate what was good about this unusual summer, and envision what will be good about starting school again.

Organizational Strategies

ORGANIZE YOUR STUFF: Create a family “Landing Zone”

Designate a spot in your home where students can drop their backpacks each day after school. Often, this will be just inside the door they use to enter your home each day. Hooks for jackets or bins for shoes can be a good addition, but however you do it, make it part of your daily transition routine to corral these items before they get strewn around the house. A few minutes spent emptying and reorganizing the backpack each day will pay off in a smoother start the next morning, so teach your child to do this with you until they can manage this task on their own.

As your child completes daily homework, repack the bag and place it in the Landing Zone, which becomes the Launch Pad for the next day! Anything that needs to go to school in the morning should be back in the Launch Pad before bedtime.

Older students may want to keep their items in their own room, but if they struggle with organization, they may need extra support in this area. Help them break down the task of managing their school materials and sports equipment into 4 steps:

1. Drop: designate a place to put things when you first come into the house (the same place every day!)
2. Do: complete the work you need to do (sort out trash, complete the homework, clean the equipment)
3. Deliver: put the completed work in the backpack; repack the sports bag for tomorrow’s practice
4. Depart: each evening, prepare your entire bag for “grab and go” in the morning. Fewer steps and fewer decisions will make for a smoother, less stressful launch!

ORGANIZE YOUR TIME

After five months of not being sure what day it is (Is it Blursday? No, it’s Blahsday), we are going to have to take some steps to get oriented to time once again. Get out your family calendar and mark in everyone’s activities, including blocking out time to prep for school. Pull out the calendar at a family meal or meeting each weekend and look at what is coming up in the week ahead, so no one is caught off-guard by a family commitment or doctor’s appointment.

As students grow up, they need to be taking increasing ownership of their own time resources. This includes planning for upcoming events, managing time needed for homework and other projects. It also includes figuring out how to get out the door each morning (another skill that may have gone rusty over the past few months!).

How strong are your child’s time management skills? Here are some age-based goals to shoot for:

• By grade 3: a student should be able to tell something about the passage of time; he should be fairly competent with telling time on the analog clock face, and can also understand something about time durations (for example, 3 minutes is a short amount of time, but 3 hours is quite a bit longer).
• By grade 6: a student should understand the purpose of filling out a homework planner at school and using it to guide homework completion at home. He or she needs to start estimating how long the tasks will take, so enough time is set aside for them. He or she may still need support to do these tasks consistently, but the groundwork for future independence should be laid by upper elementary.
• In Junior High: a student can choose to use the school-issued planner or try out a different format of their choice! Junior High students also gain skill at using online resources, such as Moodle, to check their assignments — BUT relying on this method alone is not a good idea. Writing things down (yes: in pencil, and on paper) actually helps you own the work and remember it better. Students at this stage still rely on parents to help them manage their after school schedule, but you should see growing independence in remembering activities, such as sports practices and social events.
• In High School: Students need to have a good idea of the type of calendar or planner that works for them, and they should be using their chosen method with minimal prompting.

NEED IDEAS? Check out this video on the Bullet Journal, which has been described as “the best planner ever for the ADHD brain.” (Hint: what works for students and adults with ADHD often helps neurotypical people as well, so it’s worth a look, even if you’re not diagnosed with ADHD.)

If your student resists carrying a notebook-style planner, consider this one-page, weekly option that I (Lia) used throughout high school and college.

Download Planner Page