Welcome To The 2022-23 School Year

For all our returning families, welcome back!  For all our new families, welcome!  We can't wait to get started with you all!

The start of a school year usually means that we find more structure than we've had for the previous few weeks.  Even when we're working full time, most summer environments are more casual than in the other months.  Dress codes relax, hours may change, we may all be yearning for more time to linger outside when we're having lunch.  As fall creeps towards us, many of us begin to recommit to earlier bedtimes, more working out, less ice cream, more organization overall.  As we begin to pick up our new (or go back to tried and true) routines and rituals, I invite you to think about what these actions provide for you.  Do your routines include time to ground yourself or psych yourself up for what's to come?  Do your rituals provide you with comfort or help you manage and organize yourself?  

One habit I encourage you to create is that of reflecting on your experiences.  Research tells us that reflecting on our experiences helps us to learn from them and to internalize that learning.  If we take a few moments at the end of the day to think back over the events and ask ourselves some reflective questions, we can often learn something and set ourselves up for next steps.  This is something you can do with your children over the next few days, to help them get ready for re-entry into school.  

Reflective questions can be open ended, "What did I enjoy/not enjoy about that experience?", "What do I want to take with me/explore more based on that experience?", "What will I remember most about that experience?" or more direct, "What are three things I want to do again?  What are three things I want to avoid?"  Taking the time to explore our experience can help us to re-frame negative experiences into learning opportunities, while still acknowledging how uncomfortable they may have been.  

Click here to download a worksheet from Understood.org that you can use with your children in order to help them prepare for the new school year.   Some children will want to write down and explore using the questions, while others would rather discuss it with no writing.  Tweens may want to avoid the discussion altogether but you can always wonder aloud and model it for them, while letting them think about it on their own. "You know what I really enjoyed about last school year?  Greeting you when you got home from school.  I hope I can keep doing that this year.  I wonder what you really liked about last year?"  

Wishing you all a smooth start to the year! 

--Dr.  J 

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