Kids heading back to school this year are all in a stage of transition -- whether they're heading to a new school or just preparing to enter a new grade, or dealing with a new school structure now that many pandemic procedures have been removed.
Steve Zwolak, executive director of the University City Children Center and CEO of LUME Institute, has worked on early childhood education with the Bezos Foundation and Harvard. He joined Total Information AM to share some tips for parents on helping their kids manage transitional times like these.
He said it's important to remember that every ending creates a new beginning. That means that when summer ends, we should help kids say goodbye to summer.
"What's the closing things that they need to do? What are you going to remember about the summer, and it can be informal conversation, it can be formal conversation," Zwolak said. "Let them really think about that in order to say goodbye to it, keep the keep good memories, and it fills them up in order to take on the next challenge."
As for pandemic transitions, Zwolak said having kids in remote school disrupted more than just their learning.
"The biggest concern I was hearing from public school systems is the lack of learning, but nobody's talking about the lack of relationships that occurred," he said. "We've had two years where children, we abandoned our children, I don't care what economic cultural experiences, they were in school one day and not. And all the people around them were gone. That's abandonment."
Listen to more from Steve Zwolak about the transition back to school:
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