Back to School Bedtime Stories
Going back is a different problem from starting. A child beginning preschool does not know what they are walking into; a child going back into Year Two knows exactly, and that is precisely the difficulty. They know which corridor smells of the bins. They know who did not speak to them in June. The question is never “what is school like” — it is “am I still in with Maya”, “is the new teacher a shouter”, and “when does the good part of the year stop”.
And underneath all of it is the bit nobody says out loud: summer is ending. There is real grief in the last week of August, and it is worth letting it be that rather than talking a child out of it. Below is a complete story for that week, free to read aloud tonight. When you want one with your own child’s name in it — their actual teacher, their actual best friend — that takes about thirty seconds.
Priya and the Last Week of August
A free story to read aloud tonight
The new shoes were in the hall in their box, and Priya had not tried them on since the shop, because trying them on would make it true.
Out in the garden the light had gone that low gold colour it goes at the end of August, and a blackbird was sitting on the fence doing very little. “Sunday,” said the blackbird, in the tone of somebody mentioning weather.
“Tuesday,” said Priya. “Tuesday is the actual day.” She listed it out for him: a new classroom on the other side of the hall, a teacher she had only seen at assemblies, and Maya, who had been in Portugal for five weeks and had not answered two messages.
“Ah,” said the blackbird. “Maya.” He did not say Maya will still be your friend, because he was a blackbird and did not know. He said: “What was she like the last time you actually saw her?”
Priya thought about the last day of term, and the thing with the water bottle, and how they had both laughed until a teacher had said their names in the long way. It had been six weeks ago and about four minutes ago, both at once.
The light went out of the garden the way it does, all at once at the end, and Priya went in and put the shoes on in the hall — just to see, just once — and they were fine. On Tuesday they would be shoes. Tonight they were still just in a box, and there were four whole days left, and she fell asleep counting them the right way round: four, then three, then two.
How early should we shift bedtime back before term starts?
A week or two of small moves is the usual advice — pulling bedtime and the morning alarm earlier by ten or fifteen minutes every couple of nights, rather than one brutal correction on the Sunday. Getting them into daylight early in the morning helps the shift stick. If your child has ongoing trouble sleeping rather than a holiday drift, that is worth raising with your pediatrician instead.
My child loved school last year and is anxious about going back. Is that normal?
Very. Nerves about returning are often about the specifics — a different room, a different teacher, an unresolved friendship — rather than about school as a concept, which is why generic reassurance so often bounces off. Asking what exactly they think Tuesday will look like usually gets you the real worry inside a minute, and it is nearly always smaller and more fixable than the mood suggested.
What if the worry is about one particular child?
That is worth taking seriously rather than smoothing over, and worth telling the school before term rather than after. A story is good for the night before; it is not a substitute for the teacher knowing. Most schools would far rather hear about it in the first week than in October.