The Trip Clip Blog

A visual school schedule is a great way to help kids know what to expect from their school day. It’s great for kids with ADHD, Asperger’s, and Autism. It’s also great for kids being home schooled! With over 75 images to choose from you can easily make a visual schedule of your child’s day.

A visual schedule offers many things to special needs kids:

• There is comfort in knowing what is coming next. Being able to see the events of the day can help them track their progress, and will also ease transitions.
• A visual schedule helps with time concepts like first, next, and last.
• Most people learn best when they both hear the information, and see the information. A visual schedule can reinforce auditory instructions about what is coming next.
• The combination of letters and words can help with literacy development.
• A visual schedule can help teach executive functioning skills like planning, organizing, and time management.

Start the school year off on the right foot by giving your kids a magnetic checklist. This tactile approach to a checklist offers strong visual indicators of their progress and will help keep them on track!

These magnetic checklists are perfect for setting up a morning routine, an after school checklist, a bedtime routine, or a chore chart. You can even easily print your own magnets! Get it here.

The Trip Clip has a lot of tools to help your family get off to a great start this school year.

Get organized for back to school with this drag and drop morning routine maker. You can easily add your own items to the list, or edit the text to make it just right for your kids.

The pictures make it easy for big and little kids to know what needs to be done next. And you will stop being a drill sergeant shouting out orders!

Try it now!

You can use the custom checklist maker to create your own after school screen time rules. Clear expectations can help you avoid daily battles over screen time and keep your kids on track.

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A bedtime routine can do wonders for helping your kids feel safe and get them settled for sleeping.

Use the drag and drop tool to create a bedtime routine that’s just right for your family.

Try it now!

Studies have shown that kids perform better on tests at the end of the school year than they do at the beginning of the next school year – all those months off really do take their toll. Help your kids brush up on some important skills before they return to school in the fall with these educational Trip Clip Activities.

Help your kids prepare for the upcoming school year with some math practice. You can print addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division worksheets that are super easy, or super hard, or anything in-between.

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Help your kids prepare for the upcoming school year with some spelling practice! Use grade-appropriate words and create your own puzzles.

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The Trip Clip lets you print out worksheets with the full alphabet (upper and lower case), numbers 0-9, and custom words and phrases. Have them trace their name and phone number, or their favorite movie character’s names to make it more meaningful.

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Having your kids write their own book is wonderful writing practice. These simple templates are a great way to get inspired. Print out a set of pages, staple them together into a book, and ask your kids to write about something they did this summer.

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And there is nothing that beats reading to help kids avoid the summer slide. Here are some great resources for kids of all ages:

How to encourage summer reading

Book recommendations

Are your kids asking for screen time all the time now that school is out?  Surprise them and tell them yes!  They can pick from any one of these activities that help them connect with others using screens:

Although kids can sometimes seem to disappear into their screens, we shouldn’t forget the wonderful way computers have helped us stay connected.  I love how much easier it is to stay connected to my family, compared to when my only choices were long distance phone calls or snail mail (which we just called “mail” back then).  Embrace the screens by using them to keep your kids connected to their friends and family.

I also firmly believe that our kids’ generation will be working remotely (rather than in person) far more often than our generation has. The skills they gain by learning to communicate and collaborate via voice chat, video chat, and texts are going to serve them well in their work lives down the road.

Skype With Family

Skype is a wonderful tool – you can use it to text chat, voice chat, or video chat. There are other similar options you can use as well, like FaceTime or Facebook Messenger. Your kids can have a conversation with Grandma that will make everyone feel much closer together. I still get surprised by how much more connection you can get from a video call. My college roommate moved recently, so we used FaceTime on our phones so she could show me her new house even though I wasn’t able to visit. It makes a huge difference to be able to visualize where she lives now.

Email Relatives

I love having my kids use email – not only do they stay more connected with relatives, but they practice their writing and typing skills as well.  They prefer to use email instead of handwriting thank you notes to their grandparents, and it’s a nice way for them to keep in touch with relatives who don’t live nearby.

This year one of my son’s good friends moved away, and we plan to have them become email pen pals so they can stay in touch. They will be practicing writing and typing skills, as well as learn about how to maintain a friendship even when they no longer live near each other.

Connect With Friends

I’ve read many articles that talk about how excessive screen time is making kids less socially capable. I see the opposite with my kids. They use Skype to chat with friends on the computer. My older son uses his phone for group texts with friends which let them share jokes, be silly, and arrange to meet up in real life. I think this is the future of how people will communicate, and I’m glad my kids are learning and practicing these skills now when I can help provide some oversight.

Instead of restricting all screen time, notice the ways that those connections with others are strengthened by their devices. And take the opportunity to have lots of conversations with your kids about good ways and bad ways to communicate electronically!  We stick to two primary messages at our house:

1. If you wouldn’t say it to your friend’s face, don’t say it digitally.
2. Everything you share on the Internet is permanent. If you don’t want a future college admissions officer or boss to read it, don’t post it.

Play Cooperative Games Online

I was worried at first about letting my kids play online games with their friends, but after dipping our toes in years ago, we’ve expanded their online game experiences and have been very pleased with how it has gone. They aren’t sitting alone in a dark room getting lost in their screen all alone, they are chatting with their friends and working together to coordinate their efforts and solve problems.

Minecraft in particular has been an especially popular online game at our house, though there are others they enjoy (like Portal, Ark, Terraria, and Clash of Clans). Over the years playing Minecraft, they have worked with friends to build things together like roller coasters and underwater houses. They have built communities where each person specializes in a skill or resource requiring them to trade and barter. We’ve watched them handle the situation where one friend in the group stole resources while others weren’t online.  They are interacting with each other, creating things, and dealing with different personalities and conflicts, all in an online setting.

When my kids are adults and need to work with people at other companies in other states or even other countries, they will have some good skills under their belts already about how to effectively communicate, collaborate, and be productive online.

And if you are worried about their safety when playing games online, here are a few things we’ve done to make sure our kids stay safe:

• We always try the games ourselves so we know how violent they are, and whether or not the community playing the game is a good, friendly community.
• When possible, we set up our own, private server that the kids can invite their friends to, so that they are only playing with people they personally invite, not with the Internet at large.
• When they do play on public servers, we evaluate the online chatter. If it’s inappropriate, we either say no to the game, or we allow the kids to play but we turn off the ‘chat’ feature for the game so that they are not exposed to inappropriate language or behavior.
• We talk to them often about the kinds of things they hear online, and whether or not they are comfortable with the language and tone of the chatter.  This is helpful both for limiting games that have too much inappropriate content or chatter, and also as a teaching tool for online behaviors that they don’t like shouldn’t emulate.
• We talk to them often about what is and is not OK to tell people online.
• They only play games within our earshot, so we can always hear their side of any chatting they’re doing.

Coordinate School Projects

There might not be school projects to coordinate over the summer, but you can encourage your kids to use their devices to work on a joint project with a friend. Help them think of something they might want to make together – a movie, a summer business to earn some money, or even a LEGO creation. They can use screens and online communication to make progress even when they can’t be together physically. Give it a try – you might be surprised by how much all of you learn!