9 Tips for a Successful Start to School

Schools are opening for a new year. The teachers are ready, the students are excited, the parents happy, we are all in that “sweet spot” of the first days of school. Soon, ever so gradually, the questions will begin, solutions sought. Maintaining that “sweet spot” is important and to help keep it alive we offer here 9 essential tips for a successful beginning of school.

  1. Get Enough Sleep. Our children are busy. Too busy. In children, lack of sleep has been linked to behavior problems and the inability to concentrate and perform well in school. We all understand the importance of quality sleep, but when asked, parents responses are often well below the National Sleep Foundation recommendations. The NSF recommends children ages 6-10 get 10 to 11 hours of sleep per night and that teens get about 9 hours.
     
  2. Read your School’s Handbook. Really, read it. Everything you need to know on policies and procedures are contained within. Make it your bedtime reading. It may even help you sleep better at night!
     
  3. Foster Trust. In yourself, the school you have chosen, your child’s teacher and your child. From the moment our children come into our lives we are beginning to let them go and trust their development. Do what you can to improve this trust: ask questions, observe, be a volunteer in the school, participate in your child’s learning.
     
  4. Communicate. This goes hand in hand with building trust. Your teachers and administrators want to hear from you. They want to work with you for the benefit of your child. Agreeable solutions only happen when communication is open and flowing.
     
  5. Gift of Time: For the  young child, the very act of slowing life down and giving him time to move at his own pace allows him to really experience and understand what he is doing. Creativity and new ideas spring from the opportunity to allow our older children time to daydream and process what is expected of them. It is also empowering for the child to set the pace of family life once in awhile. In order to support this, please turn off the screens and set aside time for this to happen.
     
  6. Respect and Accept your Child’s Gifts and Limitations: Know who your child truly is, rather than who you wish him to be. And then, follow him to his points of interest. He will thank you for it. 
     
  7. Allow Independence. Teach your child how to get himself out of bed, make his lunch, prepare for the next day. Work to avoid the “rescue”  when things are forgotten or left undone. Let him learn through his mistakes. They are the lessons most remembered.
     
  8. Teach Your Child Organization: Are you working like crazy to keep everyone and everything organized? Take a moment to teach your child how to organize himself and the things he needs for school. Help him to learn that being responsible and prepared supports his confidence and feelings of well being.
     
  9. Lighten Up! Current news reports tell us that EVERYTHING is important and immediate. Some things are. Many things are not.Take a deep breath in the moment, consider perspective, and consciously tell yourself that this too shall pass. Patience and humor go a long way in supporting our children.

Montessori Happy Moments

As a Montessori educator for over 25 years, I have had countless happy moments with children. I have delighted in their play, joy and work. But the moments that have brought me the greatest pleasure are those that I have not been a participant in but an observer.

What do all these observable moments have in common? The inner knowing of the child to find himself in his own accomplishments. I have seen it in on the faces of 14 year olds, exhausted and hungry from hiking the highest mountain in Maine and THEN a 3 mile hike to camp. I have seen it on a 4 year-old's face as he asks for his fifteenth word to write with his movable alphabet. It is subtle yet powerful.

The key is to wait for it. The child’s timing is not our own. Anyone who has had to wait for their 3 year old to put on a sock or exit a car independently knows that! We adults are constantly chattering and moving and doing for our children. Stopping ourselves, slowing it down, taking the opportunity to observe and really notice is required for this experience. Try it. Sit on your hands or bite your tongue if needed. When we take that step away from the constant comments and running commentary we tend towards with our children, they will unfold before our eyes. And it’s beautiful. 

If we can accomplish this, amazing things begin to happen. Our children take on and enjoy responsibility for themselves and their part in the world no matter what their age.

By accomplishing a task with out the cheerleading and praise of the adult, the child experiences an inner knowing and understanding of what they are really capable of. This joy is evidenced, if you wait for it, in a look, a smile, a subtle gesture, a sigh of satisfaction, excited chatter to you or another. Their experience takes on a whole different meaning when it has come from within the child and not from us. 

Synonyms of happiness include pleasure, joy, exhilaration, bliss, contentedness, delight, enjoyment, satisfaction. I have seen all these on the faces of children reveling in their own accomplishments. It never fails to be one of my happiest moments.

Kari

Want to know more about letting go and letting your child? Check out Vicki Hoefle’s fantastic book Duck Tape Parenting http://vickihoefle.com/duct-tape-parenting-book/ 

One Word Writing

A piece of writing from one of our Middle School students hinging on one word. Can you guess which word it is?

A little boy always sat alone. Not wishing, not wanting. The other kids at school constantly teased him, because he never spoke. He gazed off into the meadows and forests and valleys. Time passed; first grade, third grade, tenth grade. The boy tolerated and ignored their jostling and prodding. Finally, one day, the he just stopped. He stopped looking at meadows and forests and valleys. He stopped listening to birdcalls and the wind. He stopped. He tried to act like the others. He spent every day playing a part. He now sat with company, but he was more alone than ever. Time passed; high school, college, adulthood. The grayed man sat by his window, wishing, wanting, reading obituaries of the people who had once teased him. A leaf fluttered on the wind outside, blowing onto his lap through the open window. He studied it delicately, noticing how paper thin it was, just like him. Then he stopped. He stopped pretending, and he stopped fooling the world. He listened and saw and felt and heard. An old man sat alone. Not wishing, not wanting. -E

Cautious? or Overprotected?

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A headline in the Nashua Telegraph last fall proclaimed: “School Yard Game of Tag Banned.” This caught my attention! What was the harm in this playground game? The principal stated that “the game of tag seems innocent enough, however the force with which students tag varies greatly and this game, in particular, has been banned in many schools in the U.S. due primarily to concerns about injuries.”  This wasn’t the only headline like this in recent news. A school in Long Island banned balls from the playground this past fall, and you can read similar examples from other towns across America. Have these decisions gone too far? Some parents thought so.

Children's play has long been understood to have a key role in the development of their future life skills. Real play, when children are in charge, instinctively making hundreds of decisions as they assess and determine the levels of risk they want to take—physically, emotionally and socially—allow mastery, day by day, in an increasing repertoire of skills which add to their bank of experience.

What had changed so much since my own childhood of climbing to the top of the monkey bars and playing king of the hill? Modern fears and anxiety, in a world much safer than ever before, has led to a risk-adverse culture that can express itself in what some perceive as overbearing safety policies. What’s forgotten are the benefits of learning about and discovering risk. Fears of litigation increase tendencies to err on the side of caution, often creating standards that lack real play value.

Through play, children acquire confidence, but also an awareness of limits and boundaries. They learn, in short, how to be safe. For our children, we must remove the bubble wrap of overprotectiveness and grant them the opportunity to play in ways that challenge themselves.

So, to my own children, who have much loved the opportunity to climb trees, cross creeks, and climb as high as they are comfortable, I pledge to continue giving you the opportunity to challenge yourself, for it is only through your own experiences and choices that you will truly learn the skills for this game of life.

We want to hear from you! What do you think about playground risk?

Read the Atlantic Monthly article here: The Overprotected Kid

Kari

One Hundred Word Stories

For this week's writing project, our middle school students were asked to write a 100 Word Story. We're sharing a few here.

She is dreaming. Dreaming of flying with the birds. She swoops through the clouds, graceful and swift. She sees the city below her, but only the sky above. Endless, blank sky. She drops through the clouds so she can see the land more clearly. There are buildings, small as anthills and cars, like ants, dodging between them. And there is the ocean! Deep, empty, never ending, just like the sky. She flies towards it. There are boats and a few small islands, but so much of the ocean is empty, quiet and beautiful. Then she is falling, falling towards the sea. . . .  -HMS 7th grade student

I am a snowflake, beautiful, crystalline. I am a snowflake, carefully constructed. We are packed tight, but we know. We know that any minute one of us will fall from this cloud, from each other. I have never been a snowflake before. I have been shower water and a puddle and flower nutrients, and even holy water that has been blessed and scented. Snowflakes begin to fall. There are less and less of us separating me from open air. My first fall. I detach from the others and I am alone, falling, drifting, gliding down to an uncertain future.  -HMS 7th grade student

Eyes open to the crashing chirps of the clock. Weary days, waking, breakfast, work, money, winter; stumbling in and out of the bathroom, closet, chair, out of his house. Doors slam. The man trudges to work. Weighing and boxing paper clips, sitting for minutes, hours, days, and dreary years. 100 clips. 180 boxes. 9 hours. 162,000 clips. He trudges home, buying a hot cocoa. On the curb, a girl in a poncho stares at the puddle and paper cup at her feet, dog sitting by; guilty. Minutes later the man opens his front door, no cocoa in hand, smile flickering.  -HMS 9th grade student

One hundred words. That seems like a lot of words, but it only come out as about a paragraph, which isn't very much. I hear one hundred and naturally think "big". In the right context, one hundred is a big number, but really, when compared to even greater numbers, such as one million, its size pales in comparison, and comes off looking quite small. So, when you think of the huge amounts of words in a story, the one hundred words in a paragraph don't even come close to seeming a significant part of the story. Not even.  -HMS 8th grade student