Hey Colorado . . . Winner Winner Family Dinner

How important is family dinner to Colorado families?

If you wish to instill family cohesion, encourage siblings to get along or get your kids to talk to you more, one excellent way to do this is through family dinners. Of course it’s not always easy to coordinate busy schedules, work and after-school activities, but just two or three nights a week is all you need to change the dynamics of your family.

Why it’s a good idea

Studies support the theory that families who eat together enjoy a happier life and better relationships. Students who ate family meals had higher academic scores and fewer behavioral problems. 19% of teens whose families did not share meals reported feeling alienated from their families compared to the 7% of teens who did enjoy family meals.

Students who ate more meals at home suffered less from obesity and the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at the University of Columbia discovered that students who eat with their families are less likely to drink, smoke or use drugs.

Best practices for family meals

Meals at home with the family can be beneficial, but you must follow some best practices in order to achieve success. Start with a ban on electronics at the table. This means the dinner hour is a tech-free one (that goes for parents too!)

Schedule your dinners and give them as much status and importance as studies, afterschool activities and work engagements. Aim for three meals a week and these can include weekend breakfasts and lunches. Every family can set aside three hours a week to share together no matter how busy you are.

Make it fun! Be inclusive so that your kids look forward to these experiences by allowing them to choose what they want to eat for family dinners and allowing them to help with cooking, music selection and table settings.

Family meals should be a fun, positive experience, so don’t use this time to criticise, fight, argue or talk about issues. If you have an issue to discuss, wait until after your meal. Mealtimes should be positive family experiences or you will create a very negative atmosphere that makes meals unbearable.

Add to the positive experience by having themed dinners, including desserts, telling jokes and sharing all your funny stories from the day at work or school.

It can be really tough to find the time to enjoy a meal together when family members have such busy schedules. However, taking just a couple of hours out of your week can really help to foster positive relationships between family members and keep communication channels open. Make meals a fun and positive event that your family looks forward to sharing. Family meals can be really great places to make memories and share stories of your life.

4 Cherry Creek School District Students Earn Perfect ACT Score of 36

Four Cherry Creek School District students were among 17 students statewide who were honored Nov. 14 by the Colorado Board of Education for earning a perfect score of 36 on the ACT taken by every high school junior in Colorado last spring.

Those students are:

•    Rick Laoprasert, Cherry Creek High School

•     Nate Gibby, Cherokee Trail High School

•    David Mathews, Cherokee Trail High School

•    Susan Niederhoff, Smoky Hill High School

Students in the Cherry Creek School District consistently score above the state and national average on the ACT. The district average ACT composite score for 2013 is 21.6. The Colorado average is 20.1 and the national average score is 20.9.

Cherokee Trail seniors David Mathews and Nate Gibby both took the test more than once, but didn’t do any other significant preparation.

“I took the test twice before and got a 35 both times,” said Gibby, who hopes to attend Stanford and study finance and investment banking. “Once I got a 35, I set my goal for a 36. I knew I could do it.”

Mathews, who plans to study business at Stanford, said he was “kind of surprised” by his score. “It was great! The best part was the odds of getting a perfect 36,” he said. “There were 788 students who got a perfect score out of 1.6 million students who took the test.”

The ACT is a standardized exam taken by high school students to gauge their college and career readiness. Students are assessed with four multiple choice subject tests in English, reading, math and science. All four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. accept the ACT for the college admissions process. Students often see an increase in their score the more times they take it, but few attain a perfect score.

If you would like to know how we can help increase your score. Please give us a call for a free consultation today! 720-441-2772

Five Ideas for Helping Your Kids Be More Organized (Even If You Are Not)

Unless you grew up under the watchful eye of Captain von Trapp, the whistle-blowing patriarch of “Sound of Music” fame, organization might not come naturally. But it does have its place, and even if you haven’t been particularly organized yourself, it’s not too late.

If you’ve been organizationally challenged up until now, sit with your child and talk to him or her honestly about your own struggles with organization. Talk to him or her about solutions they think might work for both of you. You may be surprised by their own creative solutions, and they may be more likely to buy into a family plan if you’ve asked them for their thoughts.

With that, here are five places to consider starting:

1. Slow Down to Speed Up. Each Activity has a Beginning, Middle and End.Most of us are pretty good at the beginning and middle parts of an activity. Take, as an example, playing with toys. We’re all pretty good at getting them out (the beginning) and playing with them (the middle), but putting them away is often the trouble spot (the end).

Encouraging our kids to finish an activity by putting their toys or work away before moving on to the next thing will likely reduce the stress level, not to mention the mountain of toys, at the end of the day. It won’t happen overnight, so hang in there. But it does make a difference. Try a quick check at five minutes to the hour each hour, when everyone stops to see if all the activities they’ve ended during the hour are truly ended, i.e. been put away.

2. Everything Has a Place to Live. Sometimes we all get moving so quickly it ends up bogging us down. Lost keys are the perfect example. If we toss everything onto the kitchen counter as we walk in the door, those keys are more likely to get buried out of sight. But if we slow down enough to hang them up in the same place every time we enter the house, we will save ourselves from having to search for them when they’re lost.The same is true for the kids’ shoes, backpacks, homework, lunch boxes, sports equipment, oh, and cellphones.

Providing specific spots to place these things will help keep the house and your kids organized. And the closer that spot is to the door, the less chance there will be for things to get dropped like so many leaves from a deciduous tree.

3. Introduce Calendars, Schedules, and Lists. Refer to Them Often. Kids like structure and often feel more calm and relaxed with a little bit of structure in their lives. Kids’ lives are jammed with new and surprising things, so knowing what to expect can be a welcome relief. Calendars are great for a general overview of what everyone in the family is doing. Daily schedules are great for making sure no homework is forgotten. Lists are great for individual tasks like the bedtime routine:

1. Place dirty clothes in the hamper

2. Hang or fold clean clothes and put away

3. Put on pajamas

4. Go to the bathroom

5. Wash hands

6. Brush teeth

7. Read

8. Pray

9. Kiss goodnight and turn out the light

4. Counting Backward To Be on Time. An important skill for kids to learn is how to count backward in time in order to be on time.

Consider this example: We need to be at school at 8:30 a.m. It takes 10 minutes to get in the car and drive there (8:20 a.m.). But you need a margin for error of 20 percent. Unpredictable things can happen like traffic, a horse in the road, that sort of thing, so that’s two minutes more (8:18 a.m.). You need five minutes to make your lunch (8:13 a.m.). You need five minutes to brush your teeth and put your shoes on (8:08 a.m.), and so on.

So if you haven’t started all this by 8:08 a.m., you’re already late! You will be amazed at how eye-opening this exercise can be for kids.

5. Be Supportive. Imagine and Discuss the Benefits of Organization Together.Chances are you weren’t born naturally organized and neither were your kids, so the goal is progress, not perfection. Discuss with your kids your own problem areas. Point out how an organized life means less busy, repetitive work overall, less frustration from looking for misplaced things, more tranquility in the home and more free time to do what you want.

What tips do you have to keep your family organized, and what organizational struggles do you face?

-Silvia M