Back to School Prep

Well time flew by pretty quickly, the kids had fun and now the time is fast approaching for normalcy to return to our mad mad lives. Let's face it though, the transition is a bit tough. Here are a few tips I have picked up along the way to make things easier and a learning experience:

1. Start a countdown: This helps kids realize the time that is really left till opening time. Do it on the calender for more younger kids, the visual aspect helps even more.

2. Adjust bed-time: Kids will have completely lost sense of time, am I correct? But it will do everybody a world of good to start heeding the 'early to bed and early to rise' routine that we have going on during school days. Keep reducing bed-time by half an hour everyday till you return to normal routine. It helps to wake them up a little earlier too.

3. Inventory: Before diving into the back to school shopping frenzy, take inventory of what is left over from last year in terms of notebooks, stationery and other stuff. Talk about reusing some of last year's things and what things are not really needed. Don't forget clothing, belts, undergarments and even hankies. 

4.Cut down tech related activities: If they are not sleeping, they're playing around on their gadgets. Now's the time to follow through on the actual allocated times you had for games on the Xbox or ipads or whatever.It won't be easy, buy easing into it from now will make life easier later.

5. Revision: It's also the ideal time to give the kids random quizzes, revise tables, parts of the speech, some reading practice, you get where I'm going with this, and a little handwriting never hurt anybody. 

6. Discussion time: One of the best things to do is to sit down and have a heart to heart about what mistakes were made the previous year, what resolutions will be made to improve performance in school life and then keep supporting you child throughout the school year based on this meeting.

Simple yet effective little insiders that I  hope will help you and child to settle into the new academic year easily and seamlessly.