Okay parents; it’s time to think about what is soon to be another school year. There are things you need to do besides get supplies. You know you have to get supplies, right? Go to the district website, some supply lists are linked, as well as the calendar for the school year and other interesting information. If you’re new to Shorewood schools, keep the calendar that comes home on the first day. On it you will find everything you need to know about early dismissals, late starts, conferences, days off, menus, and you can connect to many teacher’s classroom sites, as well.
At home, make sure there is a place for your child to read, study and write uninterrupted. Make clear to them it is a workplace and make it look like one. Very young children will need an alphabet, number line, and a place to write new words or spelling words. This can be as easy as 13 papers stapled together with a letter on the top of each. Children can add words and it will become a handy pre-dictionary, without the alphabetical entries, pronunciation guide, syllabication, definition or past and plural forms. What’s in it for you? It will cut in half the number of times you have to hear, “How do you spell…? “ Have a place for your child to put a backpack that should be weighted with notebooks, assignments, and other communications from school. Please, teach your child how to put papers into pocket folders. They have no clue. This will make it more likely you’ll see the homework due the next day, field trip slips, and returned and graded assignments. Please don’t let them get away with jamming papers down to the depths of the pack. So many times people will insist we teachers didn't send something home or give an assignment to their child. Then two weeks later they find it when they’re cleaning up the homework packets and paper wads cushioning the fall of the empty, like new folders. Put an analog clock nearby and tell child that for the next 20 minutes it's worktime, even if they say the teacher didn’t give any homework.
We know that kids have done their homework over breakfast, in the car on the way to school and even outside on the playground before school. It happens, but it should be the exception and not the rule. Please set up a time of day that will be for reading and homework, and it can’t be right before bed. That really never works. Probably the biggest challenge kids have had with getting homework finished and handed in is lack of time. They go to lessons, or play on a sports team, or they have to go watch a sibling take lessons or be on a sports team. If there is any way to cut down the number of evenings little kids, especially, have to be gone the better it will be. Some children are so busy doing, the time for thinking about school assignments suffers. We get work back that clearly no one has looked at. You don’t have to give your child answers, but if something is wrong they need to be made aware of it. Children have actually handed in papers with their own names spelled wrong, which I guess is better than the pile of no-names given by children then referred to as “Betty”.
When your child is finished with work, make him or her put it in the folder, then folder in the backpack and pack leaned up against the door you leave through in the morning. It’s hard to forget something you fall over.
