#ATLANTA SONS STRUGGLE MOVE FORWARD HOW TO#

“A kid can’t finish his morning work if he can’t find his pencil. Those are the basics they need to stick to a schedule. Time Management Tips for Children in Grades K to 2Īs kids move through these early grades, they’re learning to read calendars and clocks. Even planting a bulb, watering it, and watching it slowly bloom teaches the art of patience. Try something similar with outings and birthdays: Begin talking up that trip to the zoo a few days beforehand, for instance, or tell your child to keep a running birthday wish list. This gives them a sense of what it feels like to postpone something - and a positive experience to associate with it.” “We mark the days off on the calendar and build up the excitement as the event gets closer. “If they clamor for pajama day, for example, we schedule it for a week away, rather than the following day,” she explains. To strengthen time management, Dietrick devises situations that require her students to wait for something they want. “Time management, at its most basic level, is the ability to delay gratification,” a skill linked to better study habits and grades, among other things, says Dietrick. Try these nine ways to make choretime fun, too. Then have your child check off the steps as he does them - an important lesson in breaking up a bigger chore into smaller, more manageable ones. Since little kids love routines and repetition so much, create charts of your child’s morning and bedtime rituals. “It gives them a comforting sense of order and predictability,” Dietrick says. So while these 3- and 4-year-olds can’t tell you the exact hour they have snacks, they know it comes after circle time and before the bathroom break. In the preschool world, we use pictures - like an apple for snacktime and a book for storytime,” says Ellen Dietrick, a Needham, MA, preschool director whose classrooms are dotted with visual cues to keep her young charges on track. “As adults, we use apps and calendars to remind us what we should be doing and when.

Or point out patterns in nature when you go for a walk. Reinforce those lessons by having your child sort family photos by seasons, for instance.

#ATLANTA SONS STRUGGLE MOVE FORWARD HOW TO#

How does that help with time management? By observing the patterns in nature and in their daily lives, little kids intuitively grasp the concept of time - and how to create order. This is a tangible representation of the passage of time that little ones can understand.” By observing a tree over the seasons, for example, kids can see the progression: The green leaves of summer turn red, then brown, and eventually fall off the tree before coming back to life again in the spring. “It’s an extremely abstract concept,” she says, “and preschoolers are extremely concrete thinkers.

The seasons are a primary vehicle for introducing the cyclical nature of time. All those leaf prints (and later in the year, snowflakes) on display in almost every preschool classroom aren’t coincidental, says Stephanie Lampert, a pre-K teacher from Atlanta. But that’s enough to help them figure out how to predict and plan what comes next. Teachers shared their tips on the essential concepts and lessons to teach, age by age, so you can make this school year’s schedule more manageable, successful, and a whole lot more fun for everyone!įor 3- and 4-year-olds, time is essentially divided into now, and not now. Wondering how the heck to begin? No worries. “When we teach children strategies for time management from an early age, they internalize them, which sets them up for lifelong success,” says Lynn Meltzer, Ph.D., president of the Research Institute for Learning and Development, a nonprofit research and educational organization. But even though most kids don’t have the cognitive skills to organize their schedules independently until middle school, you can start teaching them how to plan and prioritize their time now. Between homework, activities, and just time to play, there’s a lot to do. Many kids are overwhelmed by the prospect of fitting everything they have and want to do into the few short hours after school.

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