Prevent Separation Anxiety During the First Week of Preschool
- By Admin
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- 05 Jan, 2018
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If your child is one of the 4% of all children who suffer from separation anxiety disorder, or if they just seem a little anxious about spending hours each day in a new facility, then you may wonder just what you can do to ease this anxiety during their first week of preschool.
Don't worry; you can easily help your child make the transition from home to preschool as seamless (and tear-free) as possible.
Read on to learn four tips for preventing separation anxiety during your child's first week of preschool.
1. Plan a Meet-and-Greet With Staff
Whether or not you took your child with you while touring their new preschool, consider visiting the preschool with your child again before their first official preschool day. During this visit, they can get to know a few staff members and maybe even participate in a group activity or two with the other children.
These short meet-and-greets with staff and other children can help your child view their first day of preschool as their next visit with new friends instead of their very first day in a room filled with strangers.
2. Ensure Your Child Is Well-Rested and Well-Fed
Although you take steps to help ensure your child gets a good night's sleep every night, you will especially want to ensure that your child sleeps well the night before their first day of preschool. Also, ensure that they eat a hearty breakfast the morning of the big day.
According to child psychology experts, children are most prone to separation anxiety when they are tired, hungry, or ill.
3. Maintain a Calm Demeanor
As a parent, you may be excited to know that your child will soon become more independent as they officially start their academic journey in preschool. However, you may also experience your own anxiety over your child's new venture and feel very sentimental about how your little one is growing up so quickly.
Make sure you maintain a calm, cool, positive demeanor when speaking with your child about their new preschool. This will help ensure that your child does not pick up on your anxious feelings, which could cause their anxiety to escalate.
Also, hold back your own tears if you are feeling emotional on your child's first day of preschool because this could make them begin to cry as well. While you may simply be feeling sentimental, your child could pick up on your tears as sadness and become fearful of their new preschool.
4. Pack a Favorite Object From Home in Their Backpack
One fun activity your child can perform for the first time before starting preschool is picking out their very first backpack. Instead of picking out their backpack for them, let them choose it themselves. This will help them view the preschool experience as fun before they even enter the facility.
In addition, when packing your child's backpack for the first time, allow them to choose one reminder of home to pack in it. This can be a favorite stuffed animal or any other favorite small object from home. Your child can then self-soothe with it when they are missing home.
After about a week or two, ask them if they are ready to leave the keepsake at home. If they say yes, then that is a great sign that they have acclimated to their new preschool and are now enjoying their newfound independence.
For more tips on preparing your child for their first week of preschool, contact the staff at Neighborhood Kids Preschool. They will be happy to answer all of your questions about your child's upcoming preschool journey.
Preschool offers your child much more than a place to go when mom or dad is at work or away. It, like any other school, is a place where young children go to learn. Even though your child will start building an academic foundation (learning their A, B, C's and 1, 2, 3's), that's not all they'll do during their preschool day.
Preschoolers are naturally curious. Exploration, discovery, and experimentation are activities that your 3- to 5-year-old is constantly ready to tackle. Here's where science comes into play - literally. It may seem like your child is just playing during their school day. But they're actually learning. That is, they're learning though play.
Science is one of those traditionally academic subjects that your child will dive into during their preschool years. Even though you may remember science as lengthy lectures by a boring professor or endless pages in a dry textbook, in the early childhood classroom this subject looks very different.
Along with the science activities your child engages in during their school day, you can extend the learning at home. What can you do to help your child explore science concepts? Don't worry if you don't have a PhD in chemistry. Take a look at these easy ideas for playing with science at home.
There are different philosophies about the rate of growth of your child's unique personality and intelligence. One of the most widely accepted models is Piaget's theory of cognitive developmen t
. It involves four developmental periods of change, which each human goes through. It begins as an infant and continues through early adulthood.
Two of the most fundamental of these four stages occur during the years between infancy and toddler. These periods in your child's life are vital to building a solid foundation to mature both intellectually and emotionally. There are a number of things you can do as a parent to help your child's growth.
One is to use structured teaching practices at home with your child, plus you can introduce them to outside experiences through enrollment in a quality preschool program. Here are the two early stages in Piaget's theory and how they apply to children of preschool age.
The preschool classroom is buzzing, busy and filled with the giggles of young children as they whirl and dash around the place. Sometimes what seems like controlled chaos in this classroom is actually much more than you think. Learning in pre-k doesn't always (or often) look like learning in grade school.
Your child's preschool teacher understands the developmental issues at play here and creates lessons and activities that promote learning through methods that might not always seem standard. At least, they may not be when it comes to what many adults picture when they think of "education." If it looks like the preschool classroom is all about play, and not focusing on learning, think again.
Take a look at how young children learn and why the early-childhood environment isn't a strict instructional setting.