You can’t get where you want to go if you don’t know what it looks like. Start your children on the road to success by preparing them for a great year. A little visualization of an end of the year report card is where I would start my students every year. Try this with your children.

Have them close their eyes and pretend a little. Ask them to imagine it is the end of the school year and they are very excited about summer again. As they sit calmly with eyes closed, have them pretend that the teacher has made appointments with each of their classmates to go over the report they would be getting after school is closed.

They are confident as they sit across from their teachers and know what is going be written on the pages describing their progress and the grades they earned.

They can see the comments the teacher has written and they smile. Ask them to describe the comments they would like to see. Do the comments say, they talked all the time or they were respectful of their classmates and found ways to manage their desire to talk?

Do they say they managed their time by doing backwards planning to make sure they completed their work before it was due.

Are their comments about how they worked well with their classmates or that they couldn’t get along?

When it came to asking for support, do the comments reflect that they visited the teacher privately when they weren’t sure if they understood the concept correctly?

Ask them to see themselves sharing this great report with you and feel the pride they have with their progress that demonstrates they learned from past mistakes.

Have them think about the things that went wrong the year before and make a plan for handling them this year.

For more helpful hints on how to start a great year, click here to checkout ebooks that offer students valuable guidance on what they need to know to maximize their performance while spending less time.

Please share your results in the comment section below. What did your children experience. This one exercise resulted in me getting calls the second day of school from parents who wanted to know, “Who was the child that just went upstairs to do his homework without being told? I want to know what you did with my squirrelie eight year old son.”