elementary school

You’re On Your Own, Kid: Navigating the 3rd Grade Transition

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

The jump from 2nd to 3rd grade is considered the first big “Academic Transition”. The other two academic transitions are the jump from elementary to middle school, and the jump from middle to high school. These academic transitions are so aptly named because of the increased workload and subject matter difficulty, as well as the higher expectations of emotional maturity, personal responsibility, and independence.

Think about it. Kids aren’t doing circle time anymore to start their day. They aren’t reminded to use the bathroom or hold hands with their partners on a field trip. Kids are actually graded by the quality of work they submit, not just a check or check plus for completion.

My son is in third grade this year, and I can feel the pressure. Each week brings homework and a steady stream of graded material—whether it’s a practice sheet, a quiz, or a formal test. On top of that, he’ll be taking the Georgia Measurement Assessment System (GMAS) for the first time. It’s hard not to feel like everything rides on this one year.

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Handwriting Q&A

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

Handwriting is a complex skill. It requires our sensory and motor mechanics to work harmoniously together to make our writing remotely legible. And when we start working with our kids on how to write letters, numbers, and eventually words and sentences, we notice that their writing is never going to look like our own. That’s when we question what is “normal”?

From their pencil grasp to writing upside-down, we wonder if these strange tendencies are just a quirk of little kids or something to be really concerned about.

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A Resilient State of Mind: Dealing with Failure

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

Part of a child’s job is to learn, and failure is an inevitable part of learning. Failure is also an inevitable part of building resilience. Resilience is the ability to face life’s stressors/challenges, learn from mistakes, and recover. It’s a big cause and effect game happening in your child’s brain.

Our kids fail all the time, especially when communicating what they want or need in the first years of life. As they get older and experiment with boundaries and connect information, they can organize all of that cause and effect and turn it into action. They figure out what works (asking for help) and what doesn’t (throwing a fit), learning and adapting with each new situation.

But somewhere in their early school years, our kids can start viewing failure as a bad thing, limiting their exposure to new experiences, encounters, and achievements. What caused this switch and how can we help our kids embrace failure rather than avoid it?

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Coffee Chat: Patti’s First Week of School

| Patti Webb

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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Coffee Chat: Mary’s First Week of School

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

It’s been about a month since my 5-year-old officially became a kindergartner. As much as I would like to say that I was fully prepared for this transition, I was not emotionally ready for the relationship changes between us.

For some reason, I thought this school year was going to be like the preschool ones before it. I’d get a “Love you!” and a quick hug at drop-off and then chat about his day afterwards on our way home. Yeah, I didn’t get any of that.

Instead, I had a kid who just popped out of the car in morning and stayed quiet on our walk from the bus stop in the afternoon. Like, what was happening?

Although I knew that his silence was most likely just him processing everything from his school day, it was still a hard pill to swallow. It’s the realization that my kiddo is growing up and these moments of connection with him were shifting.

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