Establishing a Back-to-School Routine for the Whole Family
The back-to-school season is full of new things: new teachers, backpacks, classmates, and school supplies. This can often feel like a mad dash if you’re unprepared. It’s a great time to establish new learning routines as everything from bedtimes to bus and carpool schedules to meals and activities change when summer turns to fall. So, what should your family’s routine look like to make this the most successful school year yet? These five tips can help you establish a winning routine when school starts.
Set a routine–and stick to it
Kids are creatures of habit: we all know that they thrive within a routine and have difficulty when they aren’t sure of their expectations. Set a regular schedule even before it’s necessary: if you want an hour after dinner to be homework time and they don’t have homework yet, then make it time to read. That way, when homework arrives in a few weeks, it’s not a shock to their system. It's a wise idea to have both a morning routine and a bedtime routine.
A good routine includes all aspects of the school week: bedtime, waking up, being ready to leave for school, and knowing how to unwind when school or homework is complete. When one element drifts off track, the whole routine can be out of whack: a student perpetually running late in the morning shows up for school feeling rushed and unsettled, and note getting enough sleep leads to groggy mornings and a difficult day overall. Certainly there can be exceptions–birthdays, a favorite team in the World Series, a visit from grandparents–but the return to routine is important to ensuring it’s a well-worn path to a good school year.
Create a productive learning space
Focus is critical to a child’s ability to learn. As they’re trying to understand new concepts, they can’t merely go through the motions of reading a chapter or working through math exercises, but instead they need to be building connections, not just doing the steps but thinking about why and how to do them. And that level of focus is hard to maintain when surrounded by clutter, toys, or noise.
So create a well-lit, distraction-free environment for students to do academic work. While not every home can have a dedicated office or a desk in each child’s room, a cleared-off kitchen table with TVs off and devices silenced can replicate a library-style experience and permit that necessary level of focus.
Make it a family affair
“Be quiet” and “go to your room” are punishments, so if homework is a combination of those things while the rest of the household has fun, students will develop a negative perspective toward schoolwork. But when families value reading, learning, and engaging their minds, schoolwork feels like an important part of a daily routine, valid for its own merits and not “because I said so.”
So find time for everyone to do something intellectual. Grownups can read or handle the “homework” parts of bill-paying and meal-planning while kids who don’t have homework read books or do puzzles, so that the learner who truly has schoolwork to do feels included in the group activity, not banished from a good time.
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Model the value of learning
Generally speaking, kids take their cues as to “what’s important” from adults. When families prioritize sports, religion, music, the outdoors, relatives, or anything else, kids may still complain about waking up early or having to turn off a video game in the short run, but in the long run they learn to value and prioritize that activity. The same thing is true for learning: if reading, homework, or going to school in the first place seems like a chore to get through en route to what really matters, they’ll struggle to see learning as a true priority. But if the family shows that learning is valuable, the student will see intrinsic value in their scholastic activities.
So take time each night or each week to ask about and celebrate things your student has learned–and to talk about what you’ve learned or read, too. Enthusiastically visit museums, watch nature documentaries, or engage in after-school activities. When students see learning as something they “get to do” and not “have to do” they’re far more likely to pay close attention in class, be self-motivated to achieve, and seek out friends who do the same.
Set (and reward) goals
Like many parents, you likely find a few of your child’s favorite video games or TV shows mind-numbingly boring–perhaps as boring as your child finds their homework. But there’s a value proposition in most of those games and shows: there’s a clear obstacle or objective for the player or protagonist, a direct path to achieving it, and a reward when it’s over.
That’s why goal-setting–and rewarding–can be so helpful in getting students to engage in reading or homework. Remember the Pizza Hut Book-It program? Clear goals (read a certain number of books), a clear path for the student to accomplish the goal (find books you like and read them), and obviously a great reward (pizza!). When you and your student set similar goals–read a certain number of books in a month, turn in all of their assignments on time this week, etc. – you can turn what may seem like an endless slog to a distant finish line (summer is forever away) into a series of achievable tasks with rewards…much like a video game that can be both boring to some and addictive to your child.
So, do you feel like starting school yet? If not, that is quite alright (and completely normal). Remember that if you're struggling to develop a routine that works for you, Varsity Tutors is always here to help. We are a great resource for students who need extra study materials, advice, tutoring, or online lessons in specific subject areas. You never have to go without support as long as Varsity Tutors is around.
