The Price for Being Absent from School

“School is more demanding for my kids than it was when I went to school.” How many times have you said this or heard this said?

Kids need to be at their best in order to do well and enjoy school. It seems that never before has it been more important have healthy school kids and to avoid absences from school. I talked to our teacher bloggers, Connie McCarthy and Livia McCoy and asked them how kids missing school affects their class room and the student.

Connie, focusing on early elementary school said, “It's the initial instructional lesson that is SO important. (Not written work that can be made up.) Repeated absences can cause a child to miss an important part of sequential learning. Two things can happen:

1. Children fall behind because they are missing an important piece of instruction.
2. Or, chronic absences can sometimes force teachers to slow the pace of instruction, in order to review lessons for children who missed crucial skills. This ultimately affects the entire class.”

Livia talked about how kids being absent from school affects kids in older grades:

“Because learning builds on previous learning, you can never truly make up for an absence. The hands-on activities, discussion, and interaction in class cannot be made up. At best, each teacher can meet with the child to go over what was done in class. You can even have them do the activities they missed. But they do not hear other student’s questions and interact with classmates.

If a child misses one day, they have to make up ALL their work in ALL their classes. Plus, they have to keep up with their current work. It is too difficult for them to do. So you have to hope that whatever they missed won’t leave too large a gap in their knowledge-base for the next learning to occur. If a student misses 1 day of school in a week, they missed 20% of what was taught that week. The net effect may be 30% loss in learning overall because of the scaffolding effect.”

Ugh. That’s a lot to think about. Makes me think twice about how to keep my family healthy this school year. No one likes to see their kids sick or stressed out from make-up work. Bottom line, though, is that schools are germy! That’s why we want to do some brain storming to come up with a list of ways to keep our kids healthy and in school. We are starting brainstorming session over on our Facebook page.

So head over to our Facebook page and tell us what steps you’re taking to keep your kids healthy and in school this year for a chance to win a gift certificate good towards a professional house cleaning and a gift pack chock full of Lysol cleaning products!

If you’re not sure how to begin, just start with an old fashioned fill in the blank: I am keeping my kids healthy this school year by ____________.

The price for your kids missing school is high but the pay off for you coming up with ways to keep them healthy is even higher. Look forward to brainstorming with you!

* The Healthy School Kids blog drawing runs from  October 6th through October 20th, at 11pm EST. At the end of that time period all Facebook fans that wrote a healthy kids idea on our wall will be entered to win a professional house cleaning gift certificate, and a gift pack full of Lysol cleaning products. One entry per person and one name will be drawn randomly from all the comments.

Disclosure: Lysol is a sponsor of the Healthy School Kids program.