Summer Activities to Prepare Your Kids for Big School

This coming school year might be huge for you, Moms and Dads, because either your kid will go to a big school for the first time, or you will transition your kid from being homeschooled for years to going to a big school. Whichever the case, the key to making your kid (and you!) less anxious is to prepare as early as you can!

Summer vacation is the time spanning weeks or months when kids are at home and on break until the next school year. While this time is usually spent on travel, leisure, and games, it wouldn’t hurt to enroll them in a class or two to help them prepare for big school. If you’re unsure of what classes they should take, we prepared this article for you!

In choosing the classes or activities your child should take this vacation, it pays to understand what exact skills they need to develop. To help you decide, here is our list of skills along with our recommended classes:

Summer Activities to Prepare Your Kids for Big School

To get your child ready to understand longer and deeper texts
Reading Classes

With the required textbooks and reading materials, your child needs to prepare for hours of reading in school and at home as soon as the school year starts. Don’t fret, dear parents! The first step is to surround your child with reading materials at home so skills such as flipping pages, encountering difficult words, and making text-to-self or text-to-world connections are subtly introduced. In-person or online reading classes will supplement these skills and will help your child process printed words better. Kids will also be trained to answer questions of varying difficulties. With these classes, reading time in the big school won’t be as daunting.

To help your child develop discipline and patience
Guitar or Piano Lessons

There’s nothing like instilling discipline in children by having them learn a skill from scratch. Guitar or piano lessons are good starts because first, kids will learn to listen and follow instructions. Second, kids will learn patience as they are bound to commit mistakes during their first few tries. Third, they will learn discipline through spending hours and hours of repetition and practice. These classes will also teach them that the sweetness of success in any endeavor is only gained through hard work.

To help your child become more confident
Voice Lessons and Dance Classes

It’s a common misconception that voice lessons and dance classes are only for children with a gift for music and movement. When kids are enrolled in these classes at an early age, they develop the skill and learn the confidence to demonstrate it in front of a crowd! In these classes, they will also learn about creativity and self-expression. The values and skills they learn in these classes will be crucial not only in Music and Physical Education classes in big school, but also in every performance task set by their teachers in any of their academic subjects.

To help your child express their thoughts better
Speech or Writing Classes

Technology has found its way to help kids express themselves through speech and writing. However, practicing these skills with actual human interaction is incomparable. With a teacher or tutor, your child receives immediate and contextualized feedback on his or her performance, which he or she can use to improve. Speech classes also build a better communicator through appropriate nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, eye contact, and hand gestures. Writing classes, on the other hand, will not only help students compose grammatically correct structures but will also help them evaluate the use of words and sentence construction to fit a specific context or environment. These are both essential in a big school where expressing one’s thoughts is crucial every day.

To help your child learn empathy
Acting or Theater Workshops

To be able to put oneself in the shoes of another is a skill, not just in school but also in real life. While many activities can help kids learn this, an acting workshop is one, as kids will be asked to listen intently to the theater instructor and to understand a character well enough so they can effectively act on their behalf. It is crucial for kids to know that they won’t just go to school every day to sit in their classrooms. An important part of their learning is being able to make friends, build relationships, and show empathy in every situation that calls for it.

To improve your child’s motor skills, attention, and focus
Pottery or Painting Classes

Art classes such as pottery or painting will help your child improve their motor skills while also improving their attention and focus on the task at hand. It helps them focus on instructions so they can properly follow through. Big schools have art classes, too, but this is not the only avenue for kids to apply what they learn from pottery or painting. They can also learn about resourcefulness, creative thinking, and critical thinking as they develop their own strategies for finishing a task in a more efficient manner.

To develop your child’s interpersonal skills
Sports Clinics

With sports clinics, kids will learn the value of working and communicating with others to achieve a common goal. These will also help them develop discipline in themselves first so they can be valuable members of the team. Whether or not your child participates in sports competitions in big school, he or she will learn from sports clinics an all-important life lesson: winning is not always guaranteed, so they should learn how to deal with losing and failing.

It’s important to note that kids might not develop all these skills in a span of sessions, weeks, or months. However, these may be good reference points on days when they need to be reminded about values such as focus, teamwork, or discipline. Also, these classes might spark an interest or passion in them! Your kids can continue taking them as the school year progresses or if their schedule allows. It also pays to know how the big school conducts its classes and what subjects your kids will take, so the preparation can be more tailored to what your kids truly need.

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