The beginning of summer usually doesn’t mean that much to adults—the season changes, but you go to work and pay the credit card bills just the same. It’s easy to forget that the change between the school year and summer is a deal to kids. A family celebration, ceremony, or ritual is the perfect way to respect the transition and help your little ones navigate their mini life-change smoothly.
Plus, it’s fun. My little family started annually celebrating the end of the school year after my kid had a rocky time in sixth grade. He came home from the last day of school and said, “Hey, dad, can I burn all my school notes?” After a moment of panic thinking, “but what if you them,” I remembered the zero times in my life that I consulted my sixth grade biology notes and said, “Yeah, let’s do it.
” So that evening, the family and a few close friends gathered around a backyard fire pit and watched while Dexter solemnly dropped pages of his notebooks into the fire. Maybe it was partly because we were letting him do something "dangerous," but it was clear from the way my normally lighthearted kid carefully and solemnly fed those looseleaf sheets into the flames that something important was happening to him. Then, with the symbolic past in ashes, we all shared our hopes and goals for the coming summer.
We’ve celebrated the end of the school year with notebook burning every year since. He doesn’t burn everything, of course—school projects, artwork, and meaningful w.