I remember as a child going to J.C. Penney's in August every year to get new school clothes.  It seemed by the end of summer that our shoes were always    woefully worn out.  (Boys can be so rough on shoes!) Our socks always had holes in them--from taking off our shoes and only wearing socks (we were awfully rough on socks, too!). We bought two pair of blue jeans (I wore slims), and five shirts. Then we went to the Five-and-Dime store (T, G, and Y) and got our school supplies and capped off this expedition with a Coke at Skillern's Drug Store.

How do you prepare your child for school?  I don't mean simply in buying new clothes or new school supplies. Rather, how do you prepare them for the pressures of daily school life: the peer pressure to conform? the overall pressure to perform? the values you want to instill in your child that are likely not shared by the other kids or their parents?

Let us be careful that we not simply prepare our children materially for school without also preparing them spiritually and emotionally. Many of our kids are   literally "missionaries on foreign soil."

Here are invaluable ways to prepare your child for school, both before they go and in an ongoing way.

Pray for them daily.

Read a devotion with them before school every day. (See Jeanne Webber for some suggestions.)

Pray with them before school each day. (See the BCP. p. 137 for an outline of prayer.)

In the afternoon or evening help them process their day.

Read to your younger children in the evenings, such books as C.S. Lewis's    Narnia books, The Screwtape Letters; Barrington Bunny by Martin Bell (short  story; you can find it online); and/or O Ye Jugs and Julips by Virginia Cary     Hudson, to name a few. 

Most of all: be sure to pray for your children and their specific concerns. I know; I already said that.