(Disclaimer: These questions have been developed from the common sense standards of child development and bear no intended resemblance to the new National Common Core Curriculum Standards or any other state or federal standards currently mandated for implementation in education.)

1. Your child is excited to go back to school because:

a. They are bored

b. They will get to see their friends everyday

c. They get new clothes and neat school stuff

d. They are looking forward to a fresh start with a new teacher

e. Some of the above

f. All of the above

g. None of the above

2. Your child is scared and worried about going back to school because:

a. They don’t like school

b. They don’t have many friends at school and none of those friends are in their new class

c. They don’t like dressing up and are not likely to

d. They’ve heard all about their new teacher

e. Some of the above

f. All of the above

g. None of the above

3. You are glad your child is going back to school because:

a. You miss packing lunches

b. You are excited about the school your child attends and love the letter your child received from the teacher welcoming them back

c. You’re going back to school too and need time to do the homework

d. Frankly, you need a break

e. Some of the above

f. None of the above

4. You are worried about your child going back to school because:

a. It’s a brand new school and you don’t know much about it

b. This is your child’s third school in five years and your child is shy and uncertain

c. Your child was picked on in school last year and you’re not sure how to approach this year’s teacher

d. You had trouble learning in school and see your child having similar issues

e. Some of the above

f. None of the above

The truth of the matter . . .

The beginning of every school year is a major transition point in family life. No matter how you answered the quiz, there is a mix of anxiety and excitement in children and in you (and, of course, their teachers.)

Here are a few simple suggestions that might help:

1. Establish your getting-ready-for-school routines a few days before school actually begins

a. Reign in bedtime

b. Reign in TV and cyberspace

c. Decide on school morning responsibilities at home; practice them the day before school to see if they “fit” in the time allotted—wake your child up the day before school at the appointed hour and practice going through your routines. Then maybe take them for a ride by the school or for a special final-day-of-summer family activity if you can. If not, when you get home from work the day before school, go over the next morning’s routines.

2. Try not to leave getting school supplies until the very last minute, and follow the teacher’s suggested list.

Don’t load your child up with extras. You can save those for nice surprises later in the year.

3. If you can find the time, don’t wait to meet your child’s teacher until Open House.

On day one, though, just say hello. Your child’s teacher isn’t necessarily going to remember you in the sea of new faces. Stop by in a week or so to introduce yourself in the morning or at dismissal time. Even a minute or two with the teacher in these circumstances will give you a chance to hear how your child is adjusting.

4. Once the first few days of school have passed, try to stop asking your child, “How was school today?” or “What did you do in school today?”

Kids already have ready answers to those questions: “Fine.” and “Nothing.” Try specifics, like: “Hey, what were kids playing out on the playground today?” or “Tell me something that made you laugh in school today” or “Can you tell me something the teacher said today—something you’d never known before?”

5. Use bedtime as a time to listen carefully to what your child tells you about school.

Try to make time for this in your evening routine, especially in the first month of school. Bedtime is often a time when children feel most at ease about telling you what’s really going on.

I hope each of your children will have a wonderful beginning-of-school this year—and I hope you’ll write and let me know how it goes!

We arrange and rearrange desks. Where should I put my desk this year? Do I want my kids’ desks in pairs? Threes? Fours? What combinations? Assigned seats to start? Choice of desks to start? How many of these kids know each other? Where should the meeting rug go? Take-a-break spaces?

The first pass at all of this might not feel quite right. Try again. Need some expert advice? Turn to Marlynn Clayton’s masterpiece, Classroom Spaces That Work. Marlynn is one of the master interior designers of elementary classrooms. She understands classroom spaces from a career in her own classrooms and from helping hundreds of teachers move their furniture, literally and figuratively, in scores of schools.

Take a minute to review your class list again and rearrange it by the kids’ birthdays. Why? Well, where your “birthday cluster” is this year will give you a rough idea of how the children’s developmental stages are going to affect their behavior, how the room arrangement can respond to that behavior,  and when you’ll need to rearrange during the year. (See Appendix A in Yardsticks.)

So, you’ve rearranged for the fourth time? It’s time to say, “Good enough!” Go finish that summer novel, take a leisurely walk with a best friend or spend some precious time with your family getting them prepared to send you off to school as they do every year.

Oh, and have you made that New Year’s Resolution? (Yes, this is every teacher’s real New Year beginning, right?)
OK … here are a few choices:

• Don’t bring so much work home each night (hint – get a smaller bag).
• Find a quiet half hour for yourself every day (yeah, right). Seriously.
• Before you enter your classroom each morning, visualize one kid from your room having breakfast at home or visualize one of your own children getting on the bus, or walking to class at college.
• Hold tight to time for reflection in your classroom.
• Make sure the jobs you assign to your kids, not just your own efforts, keep the room beautiful.
• Invite your principal to your morning meeting sometime in the first two weeks of school.
• Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re a great teacher!

On the first day of school, those of us who teach know these data by name, not just by number or item analysis or proficiency status. In our classrooms, data are students: real children with questions and longings. Until we know not only their names, but the stories behind their shy smiles and shiny, new, first-day-back clothes, we cannot truly assess their learning strengths and needs. That’s why we take the time to develop new relationships every year with twenty-something young souls to whom we give our undivided attention until we know them as fully as possible. We watch them write, listen to them read, observe them interacting with each other and solving their math problems and their friendship problems. We meld them into a childhood learning community, insisting on and creating the kind of collaboration and cooperation that we also long for in our teacher teams as we adults try to learn from each other.

Our data are three dimensional. They sometimes get sick. Some move from apartment to apartment and town to town. Their parents work two jobs and don’t see the data as much as they wish. Some data’s parents get divorced; some shout at their data to do their homework, asking, “Why are you so stupid?” Some data’s parents forget to pack a lunch or to send in a permission slip so the data can go on a field trip. Some skip data conferences or ignore the report cards the data brings home.

Other data sleep in the same bed every night and are tucked in and read to as often as possible. They get up and have breakfast and watch cartoons and talk on Skype and do homework on their own computers and go on vacation and always have a snack every day. They get tired and bored and expect learning to be easy and cry when they don’t get it the first time.

People who design high-stakes tests and common standards for academic performance know a lot about one-dimensional data that they want all on the same page: numbers on spread sheets attached to cognitive learning targets that must be met so annual yearly progress toward these targets can be made. Decision making about academic interventions that can improve the rate of growth toward these targets and that are based on the assessments these experts have designed is called “data-driven decision making” and given vaunted status by state and federal educational policy makers.

Perhaps we should invite those driving the testing and policy buses to actually ride the school bus in September. We should invite them to come to class to see who these data are and what these data are being asked to learn and master and what it feels like these days to be in school. Meantime, most teachers will continue to see their professional obligations in 3-D.

“Every time I read, hear, or think about 21st Century Skills I automatically connect to the Responsive Classroom® approach. The core skills of the approach are at the very heart of 21st Century Skills. Those of us already using RC do not think of 21st Century Skills as an add on, but as a long awaited call from the business sector.”

My interpretation of what Tracy might mean by this comment is that the business sector “gets” that 21st Century Skills for effective business practice must involve teaching students at all ages such skills as communication, cooperation, assertiveness, responsibility; empathic and self-regulatory behavior and that the business sector wishes that more teachers and schools would make these skills central to their instruction on an ongoing basis.

Taking this cue from Tracy, we can learn something by futher applying her thinking to all the attention given these days in education circles to the concept of “learning communities,” as in “professional learning communities” or “classroom communities.” People using these terms are focusing on the word “community” as an implicit goal that appears to be somehow vital to improved learning on the part of students and the adults who teach and lead in schools.

Perhaps Tracy might say “ditto!” to this, for business people speak often of their vital need for team players who know how to participate in the workplace as part of a collaborative community. Responsive Classroom premises and practices are promulgated on the belief that community in school means the “social negotiation of meaning through practical activity,” as anthropologist Barbara Rogoff defines learning. Add to that the fact that public school classroom and school communities exist, by their democratic mandate, to educate the citizenry so that they can uphold and perpetuate agreed-upon rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Today, much of the conceptual focus and time spent in classroom and school learning comunities centers around performance results in terms of measuring individual academic achievement that is based on uniform standards and measures of learning. The call from the business community that Tracy speaks of is asking us to pay attention to their continuing experience that even top graduates of the best schools in terms of academics are often not able to participate effectively in today’s business environment. That environment demands the ability to negotiate and navigate flexibly, ethically, and collaboratively in a global community.

A great emphasis in education these days is the call for “21st Century Skills” to be taught in PreK–12 education. The purpose of this emphasis is to bring curriculum and instruction into alignment and relevance with the environment today’s students will live and work in as adults.

There is no universal agreement on what the list of these skills should include. Googling this hot-button topic reveals a minefield of viewpoints. But here’s a sample:

• The three R’s include: English, reading, or language arts; mathematics; science; foreign languages; civics; government; economics; arts; history; and geography.

• The four C’s include: critical thinking and problem solving; communication, collaboration; and creativity and innovation

(From: Partnership for 21st Century Skills—a collaboration of several major players in government, national education organizations, business, and industry)

Some schools seeking to head in this direction are currently using curriculum and instruction approaches such as the Responsive Classroom approach®, Tools of the Mind®, or Developmental Designs.® These (and other quality programs) teach the integration of social and academic learning through differentiated, theme and project-based instruction with an emphasis on problem-solving. Schools using these programs are already headed in the right direction.

Think critically about what you read in all the treatises and white papers on 21st Century Skills and then line up those concepts next to this list of familiar skills that I’m constantly featuring on this blog:

• Cooperation—the ability to work, learn, evaluate, and accomplish something together with a partner, a family, a teacher, a work group, or a community.

• Assertion—the ability to communicate ideas, suggest solutions, develop a sense of one’s voice in the world.

• Responsibility—the ability to understand and act constructively in relationship to our interdependency in all social, academic, and civic environments.

• Empathy—the ability to see the world from someone else’s perspective and act in response with kindness, respect, and compassion.

• Self-regulation/self-control—the ability to inhibit impulsive action, to calm oneself, to think before taking action, to make a plan, to listen.

These skills are foundational prerequisites for the acquisition of any of the more complex and abstract metacognitive skills being explored as essential in this 21st Century of ours.

Educators are increasingly becoming aware that social and emotional learning is at least equally as important as academic skill development in schools. They’re also realizing that explicit instruction in both social-emotional and academic skills, when well integrated, can have a dramatic impact on behavior as well as achievement.

This awareness is moving schools to think more profoundly about applying child development knowledge; brain research on executive functioning; and the benefits of kinesthetic learning, music, dance, art, and physical exercise with explicit instruction in social skills into their core curriculum and daily practice.

Recent tragic suicides traced directly to bullying behavior in schools have led states like Massachusetts to enact legislation with strict enforcement and heightened school programming to deal with repeated unregulated behavior of this nature targeted at individual children. In Massachusetts, the legislation also has moved the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to “publish guidelines for the implementation of social and emotional learning curricula in grades kindergarten through 12, inclusive, by June 30, 2011.”

Social and emotional learning can no longer be relegated to the backseat character education slogan of the month or other such superficial feel-good lesson approaches that talk at kids about how they should be behaving. Zero-tolerance, “just say no” approaches to intolerable behavior are also being shown to have less than desirable, if not negative, impacts on school climate, culture, and learning.

Schools can certainly benefit from explicit and conscious curriculum approaches such as Tools of the Mind® in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, the Responsive Classroom® approach in K-6, Open Circle® in K-6, Developmental Designs® in grades 5–9, and programs of the Developmental Studies Center™, K–6. All have developed integrated social and academic instructional approaches over a period of 15 to 30 years.

But whatever approaches schools choose in order to deepen the connection between social and academic growth, in the end, the outcomes in both citizenship and scholarship for the children will depend on the nurturing classroom teachers, staff, and school leaders provide for their students. Hopefully, an emphasis on the whole child and the social-academic connection for positive learning outcomes will provide both encouragement and hope for these adults in their critical work.

Lily gets to know all the life guards and will begin another year of swimming lessons in another week. She meets the water on her own terms. She knows her limits when she is over her head, but it is good there is always a lifeguard there to keep a watchful eye.

Lily and her swimming makes me think of Lily and kindergarten, which she enters in September. Lily turns six in September, which will make her one of the oldest children chronologically in her class. She loves to play, pretend dress up, paint, sing and dance, write, and be read to—all the things good kindergartens provide. My greatest wish for Lily and her classmates, some of whom will have just turned five in August, is that they be allowed to explore learning in their classroom the way Lily explores the water at the Rec Center. All teachers, but especially kindergarten teachers, are like lifeguards and swim instructors: They keep a watchful eye, observing all that their students do; noticing their interests, strengths, and gifts; and scaffolding new learning with instruction that stretches their abilities and challenges their intellect.

In the best kindergartens, children get to learn with their whole selves, just as in swimming, not just with their heads and with pencil and paper. They get to play and paint, learn through dramatic play, construct with blocks and puzzles, learn math with manipulatives and games, hear classic children’s literature, swim in a print and picture rich environment, and challenge themselves at the leading edge of their learning, wherever that is for them.

I’ve already had a chance to visit Lily’s kindergarten with Lily’s mom and I am confident that a joyful experience awaits her and her classmates and that they will quickly become a learning community for each other under the watchful eye of their competent lifeguard and instructor.

My granddaughter, Lily, loves to learn. So do all children entering school, each in their own way. May kindergarten be preserved everywhere as the place where children can learn to swim through the world of learning and develop the courage and confidence they need to be “in school.”

Isaiah showed perseverance with his martial arts (gaining a green belt) and with his first year in organized baseball: He got to pitch in two games, played the outfield, and by the end of the season began to connect with his bat. While his team struggled through a losing season, he and his teammates had good team spirit and the kind of patient coach every ten-year-old needs. The coach taught the kids a lot of fundamentals about the game and good sportmanship.

Isaiah showed considerable lack of perseverance when it came to chores or a neat room—not unusual for a ten-year-old. But as the year progressed, he did gain some ground accomplishing his homework with fewer reminders. He got some outside help understanding his attentional issues and his strong cognitive abilities and how to cope with both. Having the opportunity to talk to a trusted adult outside the family can be a great asset for children at this age. This was especially important for Isaiah, who benefitted from having a counselor he could talk to about his feelings surrounding the divorce of his parents, which occurred during his tenth year. Some of Isaiah’s friends were also experiencing the divorce of their parents at the same time as Isaiah. It’s a not uncommon occurance in the lives of many children today.

So ten was a struggle for Isaiah, but his resilience, great sense of humor, fun classmates, a good teacher of 28 lively students, and the support of his family make the advent of eleven and the years ahead full of promise.

Isaiah’s turning eleven reminded me of the wonderful words of Sandra Cisneros in Women Hollering Creek and Other Stories. In a story called “Eleven,” a child muses about how we contain within us all the ages that we have been before.  “The way you grow old,” she says, “ is kind of like an onion . . . or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one.” And sometimes, she believes, it takes a while to feel that you really are the new age. Even then, “you might need to sit on your mama’s lap sometimes because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay.”

And so I wish for Isaiah—and all the other tens turning eleven— joy and strength, fun and flexibility, and the willingness to come to the adults in their lives for loving support on those “I feel a whole lot younger than eleven” days.

Margaret’s suggested classroom activities made me think about how much the general literacy skills of children might get a boost over the summer if students also went home with a list of writing ideas to share with their parents:

• Give your kids a “shopping list” pad for their own use over the summer. Kids love to make lists too, whether they are four or fourteen and heading to the mall or the beach. Dictate your grocery list to your child as you drive to the supermarket. Let them check off items on the list as you shop.
• Give your child a summer journal, or, if you have the time, make one togther with your preschooler or early elementary student. Some kids love to write everyday, keeping a diary, writing fiction stories.
• Yes, older kids are writing every day, many are adctd2txt (addicted to text), but they are busily writing, even if they are not using vowels. Are you up for learning the lingo?
• Emailing to grandparents (yes, I know Skype is wonderful, too) is a great way to build writing skills, and grandparents love written communication as well as being talked to on the phone. (What they really adore the most, of course, is snail mail on real paper written by the grandchild in his or her own handwriting with a drawn picture or two to go along.)
• Older children love to write fan mail to ball players and to music and movie stars and sometimes can be encouraged to write letters to the editor of a local paper or to comment on a blog.
• Remember picture post cards! If you’re traveling, have kids send them to themselves as well as to relatives. They love to get mail from themselves when they get home and they are always surprised because you usually beat the postcard home (the ultimate snail mail).
• Memory boxes. Have children write a letter to themselves at a given age about their summer, for example, “The Summer I was Six” They can put the letter in a special envelope and you can start a Summer Memory Box…a private time capsule that can be read in future years, who knows when…add pictures and drawings to taste.

Happy writing!