Last Updated on September 18, 2024 by Fadra Nally
First of all, I can’t believe some of you are already posting pictures of the first day of school. I mean, IT’S JULY! Is summer vacation not sacred anymore? And don’t even get me started on year-round schooling. I know there are lots of advantages to it but I’m pretty old school. I believe in trudging through nine months of torture, I mean, education to be promptly rewarded with three months or so of doing absolutely nothing.
It’s one of the few joys of being a kid. I don’t believe in taking that away from them.
However…
Even in my traditional school calendar district, we’re starting to dance around the subject of heading back to school. It’s not the back to school that I dread. It’s the transition of back to school that I dread. I anticipate the nightly “I don’t want to go to school. School is boring. Why do I have to go to school? I HATE SCHOOL!” routine. It usually subsides by October, at least for a little while.
So in an effort to get Evan ready for the school mindset, I’m doing a couple of things:
- Have him read to me nightly (practices his reading)
- Read to him nightly (practices his listening skills – especially since we’re reading the second Harry Potter book)
- Play computer games (the educational ones that his school gave him a login for)
- Watch TV
Wait WHAT? Watch TV? Believe it or not, watching nonfiction shows and movies on Netflix helps get Evan back in the learning mindset.
He’s been known to request MythBusters and I’m happy to oblige. He likes it because they blow stuff up. I like it because it touches heavily on chemistry and physics and more importantly, common sense.
Along the same lines, we’ll turn on other nonfiction shows like, Why Ships Sink (spoiler alert: mainly because of big holes)
or Shark Week, although I do advise reading what a particular episode is about or you may be dealing with nightmares about shark attacks),
or How It’s Made, because admittedly YOU don’t know how a toilet gets made either.
If you’re kids aren’t as science-y as I’m trying to make mine, there’s still plenty more learning-style shows available on Netflix for immediate streaming. Keep those kids busy!
For the bigger kids:
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1. Lewis & Clark: The Journey Out West
2. Walking with Dinosaurs 3. Secret Yellowstone 4. The Blue Planet 5. When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions |
And for the wee ones:
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1. The Great Mouse Detective
2. Busytown Mysteries 3. LeapFrog: Math Adventures to the Moon 4. Turtle: The Incredible Journey 5. The Magic School Bus |
If you have any Netflix recommendations to get my son away from Johnny Test and into the back to school mode, I’d love to hear them!
This post is part of my monthly contribution to the Netflix Stream Team. Because I love streaming! All opinions are my own.
We are running out of movie night stuff. Thanks for this info. I think we will check out Secret Yellowstone. Mine isn’t ready for back to school either. If I remember correctly our boys are the same age – 9? Can’t remember. Anyway check out Tenmarks. It’s a math program. You can set it up on the computer and then they can either do the math via computer or iPad. You can set rewards. I had the first reward set for going to Rita’s (something that would benefit me as well) but we do that all the time. I had to set it $5, and that got him excited 😉