Back in the Groove: How Summer Classes Can Help Your Child Start the New School Year Smoothly

Back in the Groove
 How Summer Classes Can Help Your Child Start
the New School Year Smoothly
By Mikey Keating Smith, M. Ed

Every year it happens. You and your child are enjoying a perfectly wonderful summer vacation when you stop off at the store to pick up a few items for dinner. You turn the corner onto aisle 13 and there it is. . . The SCHOOL SUPPLY display, where everything from backpacks to book covers is piled sky high from one end to the other and back again.  You break out in a cold sweat and your neck kinks up as you think back to the beginning of last school year: the battles over bedtime, the wars over waking up, and the struggles over supplies. You back quickly out of the aisle and head to the pharmacy for some ibuprofen (or the beverage aisle for some Chardonnay). You hope to yourself that this year will be different - this year, it won't take until Thanksgiving break for your child to get back into the school routine.

We all know that summer classes for kids help stave off learning loss (also known as Summer Slide) in students and salvage parental sanity. Enrolling your child in a camp or class close to the start of school can also, however, serve another purpose. It can help make the transition from the lazy days of summer to the crazy days of school a little easier.

Parent Elizabeth Anderson's daughter Lindsay has already attended several camps this summer and has several more scheduled before the school bell rings for the first time in August. She agrees that attending camps and classes will help her daughter once school starts.  "It's about keeping on track, on a routine," she says, adding that although her daughter doesn't have to get up quite as early for summer camps as she does for school, she does still have to be up by a set time, which helps ease the pain of early rising once the fall semester rolls around.