Back-to-School Therapy Toolkit

The first-five-days companion pack — every room the teen walks into, before the first bell.

$9One-time · printable download · lifetime use

Built from the Back-to-School Readiness engine, lifted out of the 90-minute group container and re-cut as a printable toolset clinicians can hand out across the two weeks before term starts. Predictability maps, transition cards, and trusted-adult reach cards the teen can carry on day one.

Built for

The teen whose first-five-days load is the visit's loudest signal, not a footnote.

Cue.The parent and teacher emails cluster around orientation week — who's in their advisory, what the bell schedule looks like, which friend landed in their lunch block — and the visit a week before term starts gets 40 minutes stolen by the read-aloud of the unknowns instead of any new material.
Body. Transition stalls between periods, novelty spikes in the cafeteria and the locker room, hallway navigation friction with a new cohort, and a first bell the teen meets without knowing which adult to reach for — the same way the teen walked out of last May.
Skills. Predictability maps, transition cues, trusted-adult reach names, and a one-sentence first-day contract the teen can sign the night before — a printable toolset the visit can hand out across the two weeks before term starts.

What's inside

Five short pieces, each one runs the day before term starts or in the first 20 minutes of a visit.

Every piece below is one move the teen lands before the first bell — predictability, named adult, transition rehearsal, signed contract, parent wire-up. Drop them in separately or stack the full set for a late-summer orientation visit.

Goals

What the teen brings to the first bell by the close of the pack.

Name the back-to-school transition in concrete terms — who, what, when — before the first bell, not on it.
Map one valid coping move onto each anticipated trigger: hallway, cafeteria, locker room, teachable-period swap.
Rehearse one ride-out cue per room the teen can predict, so the body lands day one without the prompt.
Hand a parent/caregiver launch routine back to the household so the week-one rhythm survives the morning rush.

Materials

What you print or screen-share before orientation week starts.

Predictability map (one week of class start times + hallway layout)
Transition card deck (8 cue-to-move pairs, 110 lb stock)
Trusted-adult reach drill sheet (3 scenarios, named adult + reason-of-trust per row)
First-day contract card (one sentence the teen signs their own name to)
Locker / cafeteria / hallway rehearsal sheet
Parent/caregiver week-one check-in handout (one sheet, take-home)

Script

The day-by-day clinician run — two weeks before term starts through week-one close.

01Day -14 to day 0 — clinician visit 1: predictability map, body-cue rehearsal, and the named-adult reach the teen names before term starts.
02Day 1 — first-day contract card gets signed at the kitchen table the night before; the teen carries the one sentence on their phone.
03Day 1 walk-through — locker / cafeteria / hallway rehearsal sheet runs as a 10-minute pre-bell drill before the first period.
04Day 1 to day 5 — first week check-in: ride-out cue, transition card pull, and trusted-adult reach name each morning before the front door.
05Week-one close (visit 2 or 3) — parent/caregiver handout bridges the home schedule to the school schedule; the pack stays open in the backpack.

Activities

The six printable pieces — drawn straight from the catalog so the card and the page never drift.

Predictability map (one week of class start times + hallway layout)
Transition card deck (8 cue-to-move pairs)
Trusted-adult reach drill sheet (3 scenarios, named adult + reason per row)
First-day contract card (one sentence the teen signs)
Locker / cafeteria / hallway rehearsal sheet
Parent/caregiver week-one check-in handout

Closing

Take-home rhythm so the work doesn't end at the first bell.

First-day contract card is signed the night before, not on the morning of — the teen carries the one sentence on their phone.
Predictability map travels to the front door each morning, not just the backpack — visual cue before the walk out.
Trusted-adult reach name gets named out loud by the teenager, not the parent — reason-of-trust per adult, not generic "ask for help".
Parent/caregiver week-one check-in handout stitches the home rhythm into the school rhythm so the morning rush doesn't erase the pack.

Age fit · 14–18

Designed for middle & high school

The same Predictability / Transition / Trusted-adult / First-day arc that anchors the Back-to-School Readiness kit — re-cut as a printable toolset rather than a single 90-minute session.

The predictability map and transition card deck pull from the CBT scaffolding of naming a cue and rehearsing the move before the cue fires; the trusted-adult reach drill and first-day contract sit next to DBT distress-tolerance work, so the ride-out cue and the named-adult reach survive a high-arousal first day. Clinicians running the Anxiety kit already rehearse the same body-cue swap in their worry-ladder build, and the back-to-school visit is the visit where the body-cue rehearsal lands in real rooms — hallway, cafeteria, locker — not in the clinician's office.

Back-to-School · Predictability maps

Anxiety · Transition rehearsal

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