The School Year Wrap-Up

Before the school year becomes a distant, faded memory, it can be helpful to sit down with your son or daughter to do a positive “school year wrap-up.” This exercise prompts self-reflection and helps your child make connections between actions and outcomes.

It is good to connect the dots while memories of the school year are still fresh. The goal of the school year wrap-up is to discuss positive behaviors and areas of growth, with a more minor focus on habits that need to be changed. These strategies have also been discussed here by Dr. Maggie Kirkland.

First, ask for your child’s permission to have this conversation and describe it as a chance to talk about their successes and anything they’d like to change for next year. Then, select a day and time when you’ll have their undivided attention for at least a half hour.

Step 1: Review materials. It’s helpful to get out the past year’s academic materials (e.g. binders, notes, assignments, report cards) to have something concrete to jog your child’s memory.

  • Once you have all of your materials, focus on positive outcomes by asking:
    • Are there certain assignments that you are proud of?
    • Did anything turn out better than expected?
    • What do you think you did to make things go well with that class/assignment?
  • If you have report cards or grades, look for patterns without focusing too much on the numbers. Ask more generally:
    • What classes were the easiest and the hardest?
    • What was it about those that made them more/less challenging?
    • Was there anything that surprised you about your classes?
  • Next, look more specifically at homework and notes, and ask about how/when they worked best. The goal is to encourage them to reflect on their performance and their behavior over the past year.

Step 2: Make a list of accomplishments and areas of growth from the past year

  • Once you’ve reviewed materials from the past year, take a step back and ask your child to identify 1-2 things that they learned:
    • What am I better at doing now than I used to be?
    • What have I learned about myself?
  • List these on a piece of paper – Make this list simple and colorful for younger (elementary) children and more detailed and specific for adolescents and teens.
  • Then, ask about what didn’t go as well:
    • What assignments did you struggle with the most?
    • Is there anything you wish you had done differently to make these turn out better?
    • What can you learn from this experience?

Parent Tip – Try to make this exercise positive and reflective, with a focus on times that your child’s effort contributed to success (which fosters what Dr. Carol Dweck describes as a growth mindset). If your child is frustrated with past failures, remind them of previous times that they have coped with similar struggles. The goal is to encourage them to focus on what they can learn from any setbacks and to express your confidence that they can work to make things better next time.

Step 3: Record lessons learned and note “things to work on” for next year

  • During this step, it can be a nice opportunity to begin tentatively thinking ahead to next year. Write down a few “things to work on” for next year. Ask your child:
    • Is there anything you’d like to change about how you handle classes next year?
    • What would you like to try to make things go better in ….. [provide a specific class or area that they have struggled]?
    • Things went really well in English, is there anything you learned from that experience that might help with other classes?
  • Then, ask your child if they can think of anything that they need to help make that happen. Write down any ideas your child has, for instance:
    • Do they think that it might be helpful to work with a tutor if they have trouble in math?
    • Would it make sense to drop an extracurricular activity if they don’t have enough time for homework?

Parent Tip – Try to help them generate ideas about how they can continue to improve and grow. If they need some suggestions, that is fine, but the ideas will be most effective if they come from your child!

Now that you’ve gone through your child’s school materials carefully, clear out old materials. Keep only those that will be helpful for next year and store them in a clearly labeled binder. The most important thing to keep is the list you just made about things that went well and things to change next year. Put this list at the front of the binder where it’s easy for your child to see.

Next, we’ll discuss setting concrete goals before the next school year. The list you created during the semester wrap-up can be a great jumping off point for that next conversation!

 

Put Away Smartphones!

When we want to reduce our kids’ screen time, one of the best ways is preventative, on the front end. It’s so easy nowadays for kids (and adults) to turn to the screen to find something to do. While this convenience has its benefits, it ultimately keeps us in the “shallows” of living. The deeper, need-satisfying activities and relationships take a bit more effort, but they are well worth it! It’s like convenience, packaged foods – they are cheap, often tasty, and easy to access, but they tend not to satisfy our deeper nutritional needs. So, it’s important to take steps to ensure that screen time doesn’t hinder our relationships and other activities that tend to be the sources of more deeply-rooted happiness. As we look to strategies to help us rein in the tech beast, we needn’t look further than our smartphones which, as it happens, might be visible to us at this very moment. For the sake of our relationships, we will need to learn to put away smartphones.

The Allure of Smartphones

Smartphones have come to represent endless possibilities. They are gateways to so many things that we can do, see, and learn. They have come to represent the option to see who is contacting us, texting others, checking the weather, checking our email, seeing the latest news, posting to Facebook, playing that addictive game, and so on. There is so much POWER in smartphones!

Now, it doesn’t take a empirical evidence to know that texting someone else while having an in-person interaction can harm the quality of that in-person social interaction. However, researchers have found that the mere presence of a smartphone (i.e., it is visible) lowers the quality of in-person social interactions. When a smartphone is visible, attention becomes divided between the person we are with and those tantalizing possibilities that the smartphone has come to represent.

If you’ve seen The Lord of the Rings, seeing a smartphone reminds us of “The Precious” that we wantssss soooooooo badly! Cell phones have a strange power over us, like The One Ring. They are tempting us constantly with the things that we can do with them. Middle Earth was better off without the power of The One Ring. However, smartphones, unlike The One Ring, aren’t inherently evil. They can be used for so much good! But perhaps that is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to put them away. We must understand that they do have to power to distract us from what is truly precious in life – our relationships and unfettered engagement in other activities.

The Takeaway?

So, we need to strive to do ourselves and others a favor. We need to put away smartphones (out out of the field of vision) when we are not using them. As parents, we need to model this for our kids and start to make it a house rule. To “level up,” it would also be even better to put the phones in silent or airplane mode when we are engaged in conversations or other activities. We need to nourish what is truly precious in life without being distracted by the endless possibilities that our smartphones have come to represent. We need to realize that who we are with now is where true happiness resides. What is truly “precious” is our relationships with one another. We must work to set boundaries to keep those relationships intact.