The Pre-Primary 1 Parents Must-Have:
The P1 Parents’ Survival Guide to Primary School
Survival Tip 7: Adjust your child routine to match the primary school timing
Get enough sleep the night before
For this tip, I am just going to talk about sleep…..zzzzzzz…..don’t fall asleep yet….it is an important area to note.
• Morning or afternoon session?
Is your child in the morning or afternoon session? If your child is used to morning Pre-school that starts at 8am or 9am and is now attending the morning session, then it should not be too much of a problem for your child.
• Primary school with morning sessions
However, primary school with morning sessions typically starts at 7.30am and students are required to reach school by 7.20am for flag-raising. Thus, not just the night before the first day of school, it will be wise for you to adjust your child’s bedtime to so that your child can get enough sleep before waking up to prepare for school.
• Sleeping time and hours of sleep
A good timing to sleep will be 8.30 to 9pm and to wake up at 5.30 to 6am. This will be about 9 hours of sleep. For these lucky children in the morning session, it is possible for them to catch a short nap of about an hour in the afternoon before or after they do their homework. Then in all, they will be having about 10 hours of sleep (the recommended hours of sleep for children of their age).
• School bus pick-up time
For those taking the school bus, do check with the school bus operator as early as possible to get the morning pick-up time. Some school buses do their pick-up very early and students reach school way before school starts. Thus, your child may need time to adjust to the new wake-up time.
• Afternoon session
If your child’s school still have double session and your child will be attending the afternoon session, then your child may have a tough time adjusting. Children tend to wake up early. However for afternoon sessions, if they wake up too early, then by the time they are in school in the afternoon, they will be very tired. For my first child on his first day, I tried to look in to his classroom from afar and saw him putting his head on his desk. During the first teachers-parents meet in the 2nd week of school, the form teacher requested us to get our child to sleep early as she commented that many of them were very tired especially during the late afternoon from about 4pm onwards. However, I think the issue here is not to sleep early but to get enough sleep.
• Sleeping more
To solve this, you may want to get your child not to sleep too early but to sleep longer in order to get their 10 hours of sleep daily. Thus, if your child sleeps at 10 to 10.30pm, ideally he should only wake up at about 8 to 8.30am. This will be the most ideal timing for sleep as they normally need to start preparing for school at about 11am and if they have to go to school early for PAL lessons or enrichment classes, they will need to get ready at about 8.30am.
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