Coffee Chat: Patti’s First Week of School

I’ve been beyond excited for this school year since April. After reading The Most Important Year and the girls acceptance into our state-funded Pre-K program, I was determined to give my kids the best school experience ever.

I did everything I could think of to be ready. Their school supplies were bought in June. But the entire week before school started, I had the worst sleep. I kept thinking that I had forgotten something. That they weren’t prepared. That they were going to hate their big elementary school. That somewhere there was a mistake and they weren’t registered. It was spiraling black hole of worry.

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Guest Post: Your Child’s First Elementary Teacher

It’s been a couple weeks since our kids started school. This is the first time my twins and Mary’s son are going to “big school” and a lot of stress popped up in some very weird places.

Luckily, one of my lifelines is my cousin Dani. She is a former elementary and middle school teacher with her Master’s degree in Elementary Education. She has over two decades of experience working with kids of all ages and in multi-age environments. Again, hooray for having a super-accomplished inner circle.

We gave her some questions about helping kids with their first couple days back at school, and things parents may overlook.

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Things We Loved: Back to School

This was the longest (yet shortest) summer ever. Our families have been all over the map in these last couple months and both of us are new Elementary school families starting next week! (OMG…)

So, we’re keeping it light with the things we loved this summer and what we’re using to get ready for the fall.

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Child(ish) Reads: Thirty Million Words

This book appeared on my radar earlier this year. Author Dana Suskind, M.D. just came out with a new title, Parent Nation: Unlocking Every Child’s Potential, Fulfilling Society’s Promise, and this was one of her previous books listed in her bio. Thirty Million Words was available from my library, so I gave it a try on a work trip in April.

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Things We loved: May

Has anyone else been looking forward to summer as much as we have? Now that our kids are out of preschool and are finally at an age where we can take them pretty much anywhere, it’s like a whole new outlook on the season.

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