Back to School During COVID-19 – Tips and Suggestions
Hope you guys are ready for it, it’s back to school. I know some of my friends around the country, kids already going back to school. Kids are coming into classes or doing what they do. I know there are several things that we parents can do when it comes to our kids going back to school. We can either do that virtual, the virtual classes or we get to the in-person classes or we can do a combination of both. But I also know some families that are just outright homeschooling. So what are you guys doing? Ready or not, here we are.
I wanted to be quick. I would be remiss if I did not come on here as an educator, as a martial artist to teach people self-defense and also awareness assessment and moving to the right appropriate action. I would be remiss if I did not come on and just share some ideas, some tips, some suggestions, as we go back to school. Every year I do that, I always want to share on back to school tips.
However, this year is definitely very different, right? It’s a very new experience this year, and I definitely have some ideas and I’m sure you guys will do as well. What are some suggestions, tips, and recommendations that you would give to families that have children going back to school or going through this experience of education in this new school year?
So here are mine. There’s a whole list, but I just wanted seven that I want to go through.
1. Daily routine
The first one for me on top of my list is, and I believe many of you guys would agree with this is just ‘daily routine’, creating that routine. I know we had this routine in the summer. And we went into this pandemic experience, COVID experience with a new routine. We adapted, we improvised, we had our highs and lows and we still do with this experience. Now we have routine, the kids are going back to school, whatever that looks like. There’s a daily routine, new daily routine. So this was my first tip. Make sure you have a routine.
2. Preparation
My second tip and idea is ‘preparation’. Make sure that you are prepared. Get up early, plan the day with that you get up early, children get up early, with enough time to be mentally awake, physically awake, and emotionally and psychologically awake. It’s a bad idea to get up at the last minute and rush, when your body’s not awake, your mind is not awake, and your heart’s not awakened. And your mindset, none of that is really awakened, primed for the day. So it’s all about getting primed for the day.
Your preparation needs to start from early in the morning. Get up early to have enough time so you can get what you need to get done, done. You can be prepared mentally, emotionally, psychologically and physically for the day ahead. Prime the body, prime the mind, prime the heart, and the spirit and the character of your child, so that when they get on that bus or they go in front of the computer screen, whatever their academic day looks like, then they are set up for success and ready to work.
It’s so important with meals and whatever the snacks in the course of the day, just plan it. Even if they’re at home, make sure there’s a plan that they get up and get dressed, get washed up, no pajamas. I know my son goes back, he’s going to 11th grade at Latapy. He’s going to do all virtual, and it’s a requirement to be dressed for class and what we call, in the world of success, dressed for success, right?
Prepare the day before and have the mindset. In this way, when we go to sleep at night, we’re going to sleep with a purpose and everything is prepared so that when we get up with the purpose on time that you are able to have confidence that you are prepared for your day.
3. Create a learning environment
The third one is creating a learning environment. Now the one thing I did over the weekend I knew that I wanted to set up my office, a more creative, and more learning environment. Because this month going into this new school year for myself also is going to be very different because I’m doing a lot of teaching from my room. In fact, all my teaching is from my room.
Make sure to create a learning environment for your child and whether it’s at home or part-time at home and part in school.
4. Center your child
The fourth tip is to center your child. Focus on the work, will be more focused on getting your child’s mind and emotion centered and focus on what truly is important. There’s going to be obsessed, there’s going to be things that are not going to go the way we planned.
I know what’s going to happen. I know that I learned a long time ago that if I don’t get the results that I expect, then learn a lesson and move forward. Don’t get disrupted or distracted by upsets. We want to make sure that our child’s mind and emotions, the mental health, the emotional health of our child is centered.
It starts in the morning with breathing, with having their focus on what is important, and also core values. Make sure they are standing firm on what their core values are. There’s one thing that I noticed during this time over the last several months as a coach is that, all my clients, whether they are eight, nine years old, or adults, a lot of our conversations key and focus in on their core values, what is truly important to them, so make sure we take the time to center our child and to look at their health, their physical health, their mental health, their emotional health, and help them to stay focused on it.
Be aware of that, and continue to assess their states, their mental states, their physical states, the psychological states, their emotional states, and assess it. Continue to ask, how are they doing today? How are they feeling today? And then, however, they’re feeling move to an action that’s right and appropriate. So that’s very important. This is what we call our ABCs of self-defense, the A-game.
I have a survey or an analysis that I put out there just to check to see how your child is doing. All you got to do is go to personaldevelopmentanalysis.com. Basically, it’s talking about three reasons why you should fill this out. And then I talked about some missing elements that your child might have. So go to personaldevelopmentanalysis.com or simply just type in dothesurveynow.com and it goes right to this survey where you do the survey, the analysis that gives you an idea, where I ask some questions, and then you’ll just score from one to five. These are a few questions but gives you a good idea of where they are, give you some things to think about.
If you want to set up an appointment with me to go over it, where we can look at the strengths of your child or the added efficiencies of each other. We can go ahead and have a conversation about that. But anyway, go to dothesurvey.com and that is easy to say, easy to go to, and easy to remember.
5. Encourage their growth mindset
The next tip is, encourage their growth mindset. Everything that your child is going to experience, that you are going to experience in any time in your history. Even now through this historical event, this unprecedented event with this pandemic, we are going to learn if we have a growth mindset.
If our mind says, how can I grow during this experience? What can I learn? How can I become more empowered and more intelligent? When I move forward with my gifts and my talents that I backup because I learn from mistakes. I learn from things that don’t go right, I learn from things that basically disrupted me or even distracted me. What did I learn from that? So always have a growth mindset.
6. Exercise of body, mind, and spirit
Number six is exercise. Exercise of body, mind, and spirit. What I mean by that exercise of your body, that’s obvious. Your child needs to continue to exercise the body. One thing that we realized over the last several months that, we were more sedentary. I know, I was, where I did less physical, less running around, everything was here in my room.
So I had to really get up as a challenge every single day to commit to getting up and moving. And just because I moved yesterday and I plan on moving tomorrow doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll move today. So I need to exercise my body. But I also need to exercise my mind.
There are books here that I’ve read, that I’m finishing up reading, that I plan to read as exercising my mind. I take my notes, I write down what I’ve learned. So I do all that I can to build my mind, exercise my mind. In this way become more intelligent and then at the same time, exercising my spirit. This warrior spirit, what I call Indomitable Spirit because we are going to be confronted with challenges in life.
So let us be equipped spiritually, mentally, and physically to stand up to the talents. It takes spiritual exercise. Whatever your core values are, if you’re into meditation or prayer or combination of both or just having quiet moments, quiet times, it doesn’t matter.
Do whatever you can, do more research. If you want some suggestions, just reach out to me that can build your spirit, the warrior spirit that part of you that connects the other parts of you, the mind, body, and spirit. Make sure we exercise all that.
7. Stay connected
The last one is, ‘stay connected’. This is the one thing that I’m noticing that when people go into a depression or they go into making bad choices, or they get distracted, a lot of times is because they are losing connection with what matters most and to people.
The one thing that is the first thing I did today, I know all of us had the weekend off. My mastermind group, the first thing I said in my mastermind group was to all my accountability partners, “Hey, accountability partners, let’s get together and catch up and get updates”. And then what that means to my group is that let’s look at what we plan on doing, let’s see what we’ve done, let’s see what we’re going to do, and let’s have some checks and balances along the way, stay connected. Also making sure I stay connected with my family, with my son, with my kids in the house. See how they’re doing, with my wife to make sure to see how she’s doing and us together and always stay connected and communicating.
So those are my tips. And of course, I can go on but I won’t. And if you have yours, please share yours right below in the comments.
