January 15, 2019

Starting School ~ How to Create An Easy Transition For You and Your Child

Starting School ~ How to Create An Easy Transition For You and Your Child

This post is sponsored by Everywhere Agency on behalf of GEEARS: Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students. However, all thoughts are my own.

Transitioning to a new childcare facility after a move or even for the first time is difficult for both the parents and child. I’ve seen and experienced this first hand as a birth through five education major and teacher. I pulled some tips together that can help ease that transition for your family.

 

Tips For Easier Transitions For Parents

Tip 1, Find A Quality Program:

Quality Rated child care programs are committed to continually improving their centers and the education they offer. Because of my experience in Birth Through Five education and being an educator, I know that finding great early education programs and quality child care for your kids is so important. Quality Rated is a Georgia service, a state-certified childcare rating system. It’s basically a free online search tool that you should look into because it takes the guessing and mystery out of finding quality child care in Georgia! You can use Quality Rated to find to head start programs, daycare programs, childcare programs and pre k programs. Click here and scroll to the bottom for details on these programs. The child care programs with star ratings agree to meet the standards that exceed the licensing requirements. This means any rated programs are of higher quality, than those without.

Tip 2, Know All About The Programs Safety:

With Quality Rated you can access each childcare program’s safety and inspection reports. This is most definitely something all parents need and want to ease their transition to finding a new or first childcare program for their child(ren).

Tip 3, Make Your Commute Easy:

You can ease your mind about the commute to your child(rens) childcare facility when using Quality Rated. Find a location that’s on your way to work or near by your home. When clicking the “search along a route” option, you can easily find a childcare program that best fits your commute.

Tips For Easier Transitions For Children

Tip 1, Ask The New Teacher About Class Routines:

Once you have an idea of what your child’s day will be like, you can introduce some of the routine during play. To make this tip more clear, here are some examples. If the class has the students clear their own plates after lunch or snack, have your child start working on this at home. If they do felt story boards incorporate that at home. Ease your child into their new routine by exposing them to some of the things they may be doing at school. New things are great, so I’m not saying mimic the whole class day. I’m saying, a few things to make the class feel comfortable and a bit like home can ease the transition. Trust me, there will be plenty of new people, feelings, concepts and activities for them to experience in their new environment.

Tip 2, Work On Basics: 

Yes, real basic things, such as ABC and 123. You should play games and do activities that allow your child to work towards mastery of letter recognition, number recognition, color recognition and coloring inside the lines. These are all basic skills they will need and will be working on in school. Even if your child hasn’t mastered their letters, that’s okay. The point is to expose them to basic skills. Now you have given them some prior knowledge and/or experience to build from while in their class.

Tip 3, Create Confidence:

Your child is going to have times in school where things are new. Meeting new people, personalities, routines and concepts. To ease this transition, help your child become more confident. Create situations where you know your child will succeed, then expose them to a new concept. For example, your child recognizes all of the uppercase letters so you dig for letters in a bin full of rice. As you take turns pulling out the letters you say the letter that has been pulled out. When it’s your turn, then say the letter sound or grab a lower case letter from the floor and say, “This is lower case b.” You now challenge your child to do the same. If they don’t know the sounds, say it and then ask them to repeat you. If they know some lowercase letters, but not all, put 3 choices together and ask them to pick which one goes with the uppercase letter they pulled out. Stay positive, if they get it wrong, use encouraging words. “You are so awesome trying to search for that lowercase letter. This is lowercase a” “You are so close, try again.” “I’m proud of you, guessing what the sound is. That letter sounds like this.” Encourage them to continue and model how to solve the problem. Show them that guessing and trying new things is fun and it’s normal/okay to learn new things. You are exposing them to new concepts or problem solving skills and teaching them to keep trying and that getting something wrong doesn’t mean they can’t solve it or learn it.

Izzy knows he uppercase letters so we worked on the concept of using letters to make words. She told me what word she wanted to write and then I would tell her the letters we needed. She would search for the letter and stamp. When we first started doing this, she would put the letters before or after each other. We had to work on her not getting frustrated that to spell words, the letters must be in a certain order. Now she has learned to stamp and write left to right. She can currently write, “Izzy”, “Mom”, “Dad” and “Teddy”.

XO Eryka

 

 



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