School Bus Bedtime Stories
For a lot of children the bus is scarier than the school. School has a teacher in it whose name they know. The bus has a stranger driving, thirty children who all seem to have done this before, a door that shuts, and a route they cannot see the end of. The three questions underneath are almost always the same: which one is my bus, where do I sit, and what if it goes past my stop.
Two of those have flat, boring answers, which is exactly what makes them useful — the driver has the stop written down, and the seat nearest the front is always allowed. Below is a complete story for the night before, free to read aloud tonight. When you want the version with your child’s name and their actual stop in it, that takes about thirty seconds.
The Bus That Knew Where Everybody Lived
A free story to read aloud tonight
The bus came round the corner at ten to eight and it was much yellower than Ada had expected, and much louder, and it stopped exactly where the pavement was cracked, which her mother had said it would.
The driver had a clipboard on a hook and a pair of glasses pushed up into her hair. “Ada?” she said, without looking up. “Corner of Wold Street, going home. It’s on here. It’s been on here since Friday.”
That was the whole thing, really. Ada had spent four days wondering whether anyone would know where she lived, and it turned out somebody had written it down on a Friday and thought nothing more about it.
She sat in the second seat, which is the one nearest the front where the noise is thinnest, and watched her own road go past from higher up than she had ever seen it. Then the next road. Then a road she did not know at all, which was fine, because the bus knew it.
At the school end everybody stood up at once in a great clattering surge, and Ada waited, and got off last, and nobody minded in the slightest.
And in the afternoon the bus was there again in the same place, being just as yellow, and it took her back past the road she did not know and stopped where the pavement was cracked. In bed that night she thought about the clipboard on its hook, and the glasses in the driver’s hair, and then she did not think about the bus again at all.
How can we practise the school bus before the first day?
Most schools will tell you the route and the stop before term starts, and many will let you look at a bus on an induction day. Walking to the stop together at the actual time, so the child sees exactly where they will stand and what the corner looks like, is the part parents most often say made the difference. Naming the driver, if you can find out, turns a stranger into a person.
My child is worried about missing their stop. What helps?
Telling them the true thing usually helps more than reassurance: the driver has a list, the school has a list, and a child who stays on the bus goes back to the depot with an adult and is brought home — nobody is ever left somewhere. Rehearsing what to do rather than promising it will not happen gives them something to hold, which is what the worry is actually asking for.
What age is the first bus ride usually?
It varies enormously by country and district — for some families it is the first year of school at four or five, for others it is not until the move to a bigger school. The nerves are much the same whenever it lands, and so is what helps: specifics rather than encouragement.