Help your child prevent the all-too-common summer slide and transition with ease into the new 2019-2020 school year with these tips!

Ditch the Summer Slide
Your child is embracing the long days of summer, playing outside, jumping waves, and building sandcastles. With this time off from school, it’s easy to neglect academic skills. Yet summer is a long period of time, and without any focus on academic work, your child will likely have a hard time readjusting to school once the new year begins. Help your child prevent the all-too-common summer slide and transition with ease to the new school year with the ideas detailed below.

Take Advantage of Car Time
During the summer, many families embark on road trips. This may mean hours upon hours of time in the car. Instead of watching your child mindlessly glued to her iPad as the hours pass, play some road trip games that reinforce learning.‎ Try engaging your child in a game of Mad Libs, for instance, where one player is designated as the scribe and asks the other players for words to fill in blanks in a story, usually in the form of a part of speech (noun, pronoun, adjective, etc.). You’ll have some great family laughs while reinforcing important grammar and writing skills. You can also play “I Spy” with your preschooler to practice visual perception skills or play the classic License Plate game with older children to reinforce geography. To play this game, have one player write down the name of each state they see on a license plate while driving, with the goal being to find license plates that cover all 50 states. Keep the games engaging and fun, and time in the car will fly by!

Carve Out Some Daily Work Time
While it’s important for your child to indulge in the outdoor perks summer offers, try to carve out some work time each day. You can choose the increment of time that works best, but 20-30 minutes per day is ideal. Your child may choose to read a book, newspaper, or comic during this time, or even do other learning activities, like a word search or crossword puzzle. Try to make it a family activity with a learning game such as Scrabble or Boggle and you’ll build in some bonus bonding time. You don’t even have to label this time as “work time ” — keep it fun and your child won’t even realize they are practicing academic skills!

Do Experiments
Take advantage of warm, sunny days to complete experiments outside. For instance, go for a walk at a park or the beach and find a collection of rocks. Then lay them out next to one another and compare and contrast them. How are they the same? How are they different? What characteristics does each one have? Perhaps create a Venn Diagram on a whiteboard or large sheet of paper, listing the similarities in the middle and differences on each side. You can even have your child write a creative story that involves rocks (or bugs, or flowers, or whichever item you select) to practice creative writing skills. ‎You might have them do a research project on different types of rocks, how they are formed, where they are found, and so on. So many skills — including math, science, reading, and writing — can be reinforced with this type of activity.

Practice Money
For children who are in elementary school or above, try doing some money exercises throughout the summer to practice real-life math. If you stop at a convenience store, for instance, talk about which items you plan to buy and roughly how much each one will cost. Then tell your child that you will give them a $10 bill and ask roughly how much change they should receive. Do this activity in various places — carnivals, the supermarket, a coffee shop, and so on. This exercise will help your child grasp real-life math and money concepts.

Summer should be a time for rest, relaxation, and outdoor fun — but don’t let academics fall to the wayside! ‎Try doing these learning activities with your child and you will prevent the summer slide while preparing him for academic success when the new school year begins.

The post How to Avoid the Summer Slide and Get Ready for Back to School appeared first on EBL Coaching.

While most kids are still knee-deep in summer fun, the new school year is just around the corner. During these months off school, it’s easy to fall out of a regular structured routine, and both reading time and learning activities often fall to the sideline. Help your child transition back into “school‎ mode” and prepare for the new year with the ideas detailed below.

Get organized!

While the school year may seem far away, get a jump-start on organization by shopping for school supplies with your child early (yes, supplies sell out quickly!). Once you’ve purchased the relevant supplies, come up with a workable study space for your child and start organizing. Some kids prefer to work at a desk in their room while others like working at a dining room or kitchen table. Any of those options work well, as long as the space is quiet and free of distractions. Once you have established this space, start organizing! Make sure your child’s pens and pencils are placed in one section of the study space, and tape, scissors, paper, staples, and the like are arranged in their own pre-set spots. After the school year begins, make sure your child’s study area is always fully stocked with the necessary supplies so he never needs to stop mid-assignment to start hunting for additional paper or pens.

Set up a 3-Tier Filing System

As the school year progresses, the number of papers and handouts your child receives will inevitably continue to grow. Encourage your child avoid carrying an overloaded notebook and backpack stuffed with papers by helping her set up a 3-tier organizational system prior to the start of the school year. To do so, start with Tier 1, which is her “working notebook” – the notebook or binder she will carry to school with her on a regular basis. Help her designate one day per week to be her “clean out my working notebook” day, where she removes any papers she doesn’t absolutely need to be carrying with her on a regular basis and files them into Tier 2, which is a multi-section accordion file folder that she leaves at home. She should label the accordion file with 3 sections for every class – one for homework, one for notes, and one for tests/quizzes (i.e. math homework, math notes, math tests/quizzes, English homework, English notes, English tests/quizzes, and so on). Tier 3 is a file drawer or cabinet, where she keeps papers, notebooks, or projects that she wants to keep for the long haul.

Reduce Anxiety

Many kids develop a “summer mindset” during their time off school, when their days are filled with swimming, playing outside, and staying up late. As the school year approaches, kids often develop that butterflies-in-your-stomach feeling and lots of anxiety, wishing that summer would never end and school would never start. Help your child combat this anxiety by sharing the positive experiences you had at school when you were a kid. Discuss cool projects you made (who can forget that multi-colored shoe box solar system?), fun field trips (Apple picking! Statue of Liberty!), and special school events and plays. You might want to show your child some pictures of your school days and share a few good laughs. The more positive you can be about school, the better.

Read Together

Keep up the reading this summer and into the school year by spending at least 20 minutes per night either reading to your child, having him read to you, or doing a combination of both. Some kids like to alternate reading aloud, where he reads one page, you read the next, and so on. Just keep up the reading! Research tells us that reading regularly to your child stimulates brain development and helps foster the parent-child bond. Don’t limit yourself to 20 minutes either; if you’re on a roll and your child is captivated by a story, keep reading!

Try a 5-Minute Meditation

If your child continues to feel anxious despite your childhood stories and positive school-talk‎, try a basic 5 minute meditation to help her relax – both before school begins and whenever she feels anxious during the school year. To do so, have her lay in a comfortable spot and start to take deep breaths, inhaling and exhaling through her nose. Then tell her to imagine that her stomach is like a balloon. Each time she inhales, the balloon fills up with air, and when she exhales, it shrinks. Encourage her to try to feel her body relax with these slow deep breaths as she inhales and exhales and the balloon inflates and then shrinks with each breath. Try this meditation for just 5 minutes and you’ll see a real difference in your child’s anxiety levels.

With the new school year approaching, feelings of fear and anxiety start to emerge for many kids. Help your child avoid the end-of-summer blues with these ideas and he will be well prepared for the new school year.‎

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