Is Your Teen Prepared for School? Key Abilities for a Clean Transition – NESCA

By: Kristen Simon, M.Ed, Ed.S
Transition Specialist; Psychoeducational Counselor

As the varsity 12 months picks up momentum, many mother and father of 12^th-grade college students discover themselves questioning if their college students might be really able to make the leap into school life. Dad and mom of youthful college students can also be noticing tutorial or social challenges and questioning how to make sure their teenagers are on the precise path to varsity readiness. These are regular issues, they usually typically require a better look.

Transitioning from highschool to greater schooling is a major step, and it’s important to gauge your little one’s readiness to find out whether or not school is the precise subsequent step or if further helps might be wanted through the transition. Whereas tutorial skills that match the rigor of faculty are important, there are lots of sensible, non-academic expertise which are simply as important for school success.

Beneath are some essential tutorial and non-academic expertise vital for a clean transition to greater schooling. Specializing in these skills can assist you assess whether or not a scholar is ready for this new chapter.

1. Tutorial Preparedness

• Engagement with coursework: Means to learn excessive volumes of textual content, assume critically concerning the content material and produce organized written work
• Examine habits: Put together for assessments successfully and in a well timed method
• Observe-taking: Means to take efficient notes throughout class
• Govt functioning: Monitor and handle assignments and grades, plan for future targets, break down long-term assignments and meet deadlines, take in and observe a number of syllabi, handle important free time, observe their individualized schedule

2. Unbiased Dwelling expertise

• Getting up: Get up at a chosen time with out mother or father help
• Managing drugs: Taking them on the applicable time, managing refills, and monitoring unwanted effects
• Self-care: An unbiased hygiene routine (showers, haircuts, brushing enamel) they will observe on their very own
• Well being: Means to deal with a chilly or minor sickness; Can the scholar determine when an ailment is one thing extra critical? Can they head to the well being middle independently?
• Keep a residing area: Room group, maintaining with laundry, vacuuming, taking out the trash
• Keep a primary wholesome life-style: Diet selections, sleep hygiene, common motion or train, coping expertise

3. Self-determination

• Disclosure: Describe their incapacity or prognosis and the lodging they require
• Asking for Assist: Acknowledge once they need assistance and ask for it
• Self-advocacy: Advocate for lodging with their school professor
• Aim setting: Is your adolescent capable of make, set, and attain real looking targets?
• Self-awareness: Establish clear pursuits, preferences and strengths
• Profession Consciousness: Explored profession paths primarily based on preferences and strengths; Linked potential careers to varsity levels or areas of research

4. Social/Emotional expertise

• Battle decision: Handle social battle
• Group engagement: Discover a neighborhood of friends
• Self-regulation: Regulate feelings below elevated stress
• Teamwork: Work in a gaggle successfully

Figuring out in case your twelfth grader is prepared for school includes extra than simply evaluating their tutorial expertise. Readiness seems totally different for each scholar, and understanding which of those areas your 12^th grader has not but mastered permits for ability constructing prior to varsity in addition to setting them up with some helps to bolster this space as they transition.

Assets:

Landmark School: A information to assessing school readiness for Dad and mom of School Certain Kids with Studying disabilities or ADHD.

School Freshman and Govt Perform: The Typically Sudden Calls for by Dr. Sophie Bellenis.

In case you are interested by taking a deeper dive into the questions and issues round school readiness and have the chance to ask questions in a dwell Q&A to NESCA’s Transition Providers specialists, register in the present day for our upcoming free webinar on November 6, 2024 at 11:00 AM ET.

Register right here: https://nesca-newton.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_VVXHZBSESCaHAksfl_5oKg

NESCA presents many companies designed to assist college students bridge the transition from highschool to varsity, together with govt perform teaching, pre-college teaching, transition planning, and neuropsychological analysis. To study extra particularly about our teaching companies, go to: https://nesca-newton.com/coaching-services/ . To schedule an appointment with considered one of our skilled clinicians or coaches, please full our consumption at: https://nesca-newton.com/consumption/ .

Concerning the Creator

Kristen Simon, M.Ed, Ed.S, has labored with transition-aged youth as a licensed Faculty Psychologist for greater than a decade. She has intensive expertise working with youngsters and adolescents with a variety of studying and social/emotional skills. Kristen’s strengths lie in her communication and advocacy expertise in addition to her strengths-based method. She is obsessed with creating college students’ self-awareness, goal-setting skills, and imaginative and prescient by means of student-centered counseling, psychoeducation, social expertise instruction, and govt functioning teaching. Mrs. Simon has explicit pursuits working with youngsters and adolescents on the Autism spectrum in addition to people working to handle stress or anxiety-related challenges.

Mrs. Simon is an skilled evaluator and observer who has intensive working information of the particular schooling course of and school-based particular schooling companies, notably in Massachusetts. She has been an integral a part of a whole bunch of IEP groups and has helped to coordinate care, develop targets, and information college students and their households by means of the transition planning course of. Mrs. Simon additional has particular experience serving to college students to study their diagnoses and testing and the IEP course of usually. She enjoys aiding college students, households, and educators in understanding a scholar’s disability-related wants in addition to the methods that may assist the scholar to achieve success in each tutorial and nonacademic settings. Mrs. Simon has typically been part of groups within the years when college students are initially taking part in transition companies, and he or she has helped numerous college students to construct the abilities essential to be a part of their first group conferences. She is dedicated to instructing college students—in addition to mother and father and educators— take part in student-centered group conferences and the IEP processes.

At NESCA, Mrs. Simon works as a transition specialist and psychoeducational counselor. She works with adolescents, their households, and their faculty communities to determine and construct the abilities vital to attain their postsecondary targets. Mrs. Simon offers transition evaluation (together with testing, practical evaluations, and observations), program observations and evaluations, case administration and session, and individualized counseling and expertise teaching.

To schedule an appointment with considered one of NESCA’s transition specialists, please full our on-line consumption kind. 

NESCA is a pediatric neuropsychology follow and integrative remedy middle with workplaces in Newton, Plainville, and Hingham, Massachusetts; Londonderry, New Hampshire; the larger Burlington, Vermont area; and Brooklyn, New York (teaching companies solely) serving purchasers from infancy by means of younger maturity and their households. For extra data, please electronic mail information@nesca-newton.com or name 617-658-9800.