• Children look to their parents for ideas about school – what to expect and how to view the learning process. Before school begins, you can help your child develop an attitude that learning is fun.

• Talk about school with enthusiasm. If you approach school with enthusiasm and a view of how exciting school is, then your kids will begin school thinking it is wonderful and will long for the day that school begins.

• Have a count down with your kid. Make a paper chain – one link for every day leading up to school and each day that you are closer to the beginning of school, remove one link. Or have a calendar with a full month leading up to the start of school and every day let them mark the calendar with a sticker leading up to the big day. Make it a fun time and your child will begin the best years of their lives with anticipation, eagerness and a fond liking of school.

• Read with your child. This gets your child in the habit of sitting still through story time and also helps you establish study time together long before the school year begins. You may even want to call it homework so they can feel important as they learn to take responsibility of spending time each day learning.

• The library is a good place to get books, most allow you to borrow books for a small fee or sometimes free and gives you lots of reading options without paying for expensive books.

• Parents who spend time with their kids in involvement activities teach their children that learning is valuable and fun. These lessons can be taught through reading bedtime stories, doing arts and crafts together, letting your child help you with baking, gardening, house cleaning, feeding pets and playing games. Daily chores can become games when you find simple things your child can do themselves to contribute.
  
  There are also lots of fun educational games on the market like Candy Land, High-Ho-Cheerios, Twister and UNO that focus on colors, counting and following simple instructions. Board games teach kids to learn to play with someone else, and also take turns.
  Construction games like building blocks, Lincoln Logs, Tinker toys and anything by Quercetti www.Quercetti.com  encourage kids to use their creativity through thinking and reasoning.
  
  You might even have one special evening a week that you call game night where you play several games together, or if you have the time, you may want to play one game each night before bedtime.
   

• Write poems together. Find words that rhyme and make up simple limericks or poems together. This is endless fun, and helps your child recognize words by sound.

• Take care of help forms, immunizations, and other red tape.  So your child doesn’t spend the first day sitting in the main office.

Angela Oberer © 2008, Oberer is the author of the "Be Well Series".  You can send your questions and comments to her at: Angela@WordsofWellness.com