Preparing for summer is fun for students and at times stressful for adults. Parents may still be working and need to find child care. Parents may be home and used to a routine and not sure what to have children do all day.
Mindfully preparing for your summer vacation can help alleviate stress and anxiety. Take a deep breath, you've got this.
In this blog I wanted to share some summer success tips. If you are a an easy going parent and your kids are easy going...go easy and enjoy. If you would like a little more structure and routine take a look.
Start with routine. Just because no alarms are set for school doesn't mean they still can't be set. If you have a schedule to keep for work, keep them on your schedule. If you don't have to work, pick a time you want them up by each day and let them know.
Once you have set the Rise and Shine time, think about what the day should look like for your student. To help reduce summer loss the school provides books to students with incentives to complete the books. When my now fourth grader was in kindergarten we started our summer routine right away. We would eat breakfast together and then work on about 4-5 pages from her summer learning book. We started the day with education (that's how I saw it...she saw as it as "getting it over and done with fast to move on!).
I am a fan of reading and love to have a stack of summer books to read. Create a summer reading list for your student. Encourage them with small rewards. Or make screen time contingent on how many pages they read a day. If your local library is open, take a field trip each week to check our new books. Encourage trying a non-fiction or poetry book.
Have your student get some addresses from their friends and create cards to send. Maybe even start a "pen-pal" for the summer writing activity.
At a lose for creative educational ideas, ask a teacher. Take time to ask your student's teacher from this year or reach out to the next grade and learn some ideas. Get crafty and ask the art teacher for some ideas!
Not every day will be fun, warm, and full of sun. Make sure to have some board games on hand for rainy days. Or try a puzzle. Puzzle are a great way to build skills such as; working together, sorting, organizing, logic, and visualization of a finished project.
Don't forget the responsibilities. Children moan and groan when it's chore time, but that is just fine. Chores teach responsibility, service toward others, helping out, caring, and of course learning to clean and care for others (such as pets). Chores can be a morning task or a night task. In my house, if you want to have screen time after dinner, you clear the table, sweep the floor, feed the animals and ask what else needs to be done (such as unloading or loading the dishwasher). I also have a great rule in my house...on laundry day, if you wake up after the last load is in the dryer...you do your own. I only wash the clothes that are by the washer before the last load is cleaned. My teenaged son is good at doing his own laundry, he has to be, he never wakes up on time.
A summer full of mindfulness for you, as the adult, is finding time for self-care. That means taking time to put a little structure into your day.
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