Six weeks of ten minutes twice a day comes to about seven hours. That is less time than one bad week of homework arguments in October, and it is close to the only real leverage a parent gets before a school year starts.
Those seven hours go furthest when they are spent on three things: following an instruction the first time, staying with a seated task past the interesting part, and handling a brief exchange with one peer. Classroom success is assembled out of those, at your kitchen table, weeks before anyone walks into a building.
Here are five things you can start this week, taken from the work our team does with families in Denver, Colorado Springs, and across the state. Nothing here needs special materials. If you would rather not run it alone, our back-to-school ABA program is built for this exact stretch of the calendar.
Start Six Weeks Out, Not the Night Before
Skill building runs on repetition spread over time, and there is no way to compress six weeks of practice into a long weekend. Colorado gives you an unusually clear runway if you use it.
The Colorado Calendar Works in Your Favor
Most Front Range districts return in mid-August, which puts the useful prep window in late June and July. If your family is already in a summer routine, you have the two things that make practice work: unhurried time and a child who is not depleted by 4 p.m.
Know Your District Before You Plan the Week
Start dates, dismissal times, and the length of the first week vary more here than families expect. Colorado has 178 school districts plus BOCES arrangements, and a number of them run four-day weeks, which means your child’s first week may be four longer days rather than five ordinary ones. Check your district calendar before you build any routine around it.
A Realistic Weekly Shape
- Weeks 1 and 2: two short practice blocks a day, five to ten minutes each, on instruction following and sitting.
- Weeks 3 and 4: add one peer opportunity a week and start the school-building visits.
- Weeks 5 and 6: shift wake times, run the morning routine as a rehearsal, and put the paperwork in motion.
Ten minutes twice a day beats an hour on Sunday. That is not a motivational line, it is how skill acquisition works.
Way 1: Rebuild Multi-Step Instruction Following
A teacher with twenty-four children gives instructions once, to the room, from across the room. That is a very different task from a parent standing two feet away repeating a request three times. Closing that gap is the highest-value thing you can practice this summer.
Begin With Two Steps Your Child Already Wants to Do
“Get your shoes and come to the door” works because the payoff is built in. Start where motivation is already present, and keep both steps inside things your child can do without help. You are practicing the sequence, not teaching the skills inside it.
Add Distance Before You Add Steps
Once two steps are reliable up close, deliver the same instruction from six feet away, then from another part of the room, then with the television on. Distance and background noise are what make classroom directions hard, and most children need those conditions practiced deliberately.
Fade Your Prompts Deliberately
If you are pointing, gesturing, or repeating yourself, note it. Move from physically guiding, to gesturing, to a glance, to nothing. A step your child completes only after three reminders is not a step they can do at school, where the third reminder is unlikely to come.
Track One Number
Count how many instructions your child completes on the first delivery, out of ten. Do it twice a week and write it on the fridge. Families are often surprised by the trend, in both directions, and the number keeps you honest when the last two weeks of summer get busy.
Way 2: Grow Sitting and Attention Endurance in Small Increments
Circle time, tabletop work, and lunch all require staying in one place while something less interesting than your own thoughts happens nearby. Endurance for that builds like any other endurance, in increments that feel almost too small.
Measure the Baseline First
Set a timer and note how long your child stays with a seated activity before getting up, without any prompting from you. Do it three times across different days and take the average. That number, not the classroom expectation, is your starting point.
End the Block While It Is Still Going Well
If the baseline is four minutes, run three-minute blocks and stop before anyone is unhappy. Ending on success is what makes a child willing to start again tomorrow, and it is the single most common instruction I give parents that gets ignored.
Build Waiting as Its Own Skill
Waiting and sitting are different skills, and school demands both. Practice short waits with a visible endpoint: a sand timer, a countdown card, a spot on the counter where the snack sits while you count to ten. Then stretch the wait by seconds, not minutes.
Let Movement Stay in the Plan
Endurance is not the same as stillness, and many children hold attention better with a wobble cushion, a standing option, or something to hold. If sensory regulation is a significant piece of the picture, our comparison of ABA, speech, and OT explains which discipline handles which part of it.
Way 3: Practice Peer Basics One Child at a Time
Playground and classroom social demands are fast, loud, and unforgiving. Practicing them in a group is usually too hard to learn from. One peer, briefly, is where the learning happens.
One Peer, Short Window, Preferred Activity
Twenty minutes with a familiar child around a shared activity your own child already loves will teach more than two hours at a crowded park. Keep it short enough to end well, and pick a peer who is patient rather than a peer who is the same age.
Teach Three Moves, Not Social Skills in General
- A greeting your child can produce reliably, whether that is a word, a wave, a sign, or a device message.
- A way to request a turn, and a way to tolerate hearing no.
- A way to leave an interaction politely, which prevents far more incidents than it looks like it should.
For children who use picture systems or speech-generating devices, load these three before the year starts. A greeting your child cannot access on the device is a greeting they do not have.
Low-Stakes Practice Around the State
Library story hours, quiet morning hours at indoor play spaces, and small-group activities at recreation centers all work. Our guides to Colorado sensory gyms and quieter morning outings list places families in Denver, Boulder, and Colorado Springs already use for exactly this.
Way 4: Make the Building, the Bus, and the Bell Predictable
Novelty is the most reliable trigger for a hard first week, and most of it can be removed in advance. Every unknown you convert into a known before August is one your child does not have to process on day one.
Visit the School When It Is Empty
Call the front office in late July and ask to walk the building. Most Colorado schools will say yes, and many run staff days in early August when someone can let you in. Walk the route from the door to the classroom to the bathroom, and take photographs as you go.
Build a Photo Schedule From Those Pictures
A short sequence of real photographs, in order, beats a generic printable every time, because your child is looking at the actual hallway. Five to seven images is plenty: car or bus, front door, cubby, classroom, table, playground, home.
Rehearse the Parts Nobody Thinks to Rehearse
The lunch line. The bathroom with the loud hand dryer. The goodbye at drop-off, practiced as a short scripted exchange so it does not become a negotiation. These small transitions cause more first-week difficulty than academics ever do.
Handle Safety Before Anything Else
If your child leaves an area without warning, that goes at the top of the list, ahead of every skill in this article. Talk to the school before the year starts, put the plan in writing, and read our guide to running and wandering for what a workable plan looks like.
Way 5: Put the Team and the Paperwork in Place Early
The clinical prep is only half of it. In Colorado, several of the systems your child may need run on timelines that do not bend for a family who started in August.
Child Find If You Do Not Have an IEP Yet
For children aged three through five, evaluations run through Child Find at your Special Education Administrative Unit, which is usually your district or a BOCES. The Colorado Department of Education’s Child Find directory lists the coordinator for your area. For children under three, referrals go to Early Intervention Colorado at 1-888-777-4041.
Put your request in writing and date it. That single habit protects your timeline better than any phone call.
Universal Preschool and Placement
Colorado’s Universal Preschool program funds at least 15 hours a week of tuition-free preschool for every child in the year before kindergarten, and the state has served more than 87,000 children since it launched in 2023. Preschool-aged children with an IEP are placed through their Administrative Unit rather than the standard matching process, so if your child has or is getting an IEP, that conversation belongs with the AU.
Authorization Takes Longer Than You Think
If you are planning to add services for the school year, start in June or July. Health First Colorado requires a prior authorization request before behavioral therapy begins, and commercial plans have their own review timelines. Our team verifies benefits within 48 hours, but the approval that follows is not instant, and you can review what we accept on our ABA insurance page or read specifics for Health First Colorado.
Write a One-Page Profile for the Teacher
- Three things that help my child, stated as actions rather than descriptions.
- Three things that reliably escalate a hard moment.
- How my child communicates a need, including the exact words, signs, or device path.
- Who to call, and what has already been tried.
One page gets read in the first week. A twelve-page history usually does not, however carefully it was written.
What to Skip, Even Though It Feels Productive
Families often arrive in August exhausted from preparation that was never going to help. Three things come up often enough to name.
Academic Drilling
Letters and numbers are the school’s job, and a child who can sit, follow a direction, and ask for help will learn them there. Time spent on worksheets in July is usually time taken from the skills that make worksheets possible.
Rehearsing the Entire Day at Once
Running a full mock school day in your living room tends to produce one exhausting afternoon and very little learning. Practice pieces, in the order your child will meet them, and let the school assemble the rest.
Promising It Will Be Easy
Telling a child that school will be fun sets up a comparison they will make on day two. Accurate and neutral works better: this is what happens, this is who helps, this is when I come back.
How We Help Colorado Families Prepare
Some families run this list on their own and do fine. Others need a second set of eyes on why a skill is not sticking, which is where our team comes in.
Summer Sessions Aimed at the First Day
Our summer ABA programming is built for this window, and we deliver it as in-home therapy so the practice happens where your child already is. For younger children, early intervention is often the better fit, and for children already in a program, daycare-based support puts a clinician in the setting itself.
Coaching You, Not Just Your Child
Nearly everything in this article is something a parent runs, not a therapist. That is deliberate, and it is why parent training sits at the center of how we work rather than at the edges of it.
Where Our Teams Work
We support families in Denver, Aurora, Arvada, Westminster, Thornton, Lakewood, and Centennial, along with Boulder, Fort Collins, Greeley, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo. That covers districts from Jeffco and Cherry Creek to Poudre, Greeley-Evans District 6, and Pueblo D60.
Once School Starts
If difficulty shows up inside the school day, our school-based team coordinates with the district, and if the hard part lands after dismissal, sessions can move to the afternoon.
Treat the First Two Weeks as Information
Preparation lowers the odds of a hard start, and it does not remove them. Some of what your child needs will only become visible once the room is full and the bell has rung, and that is a normal part of the process rather than a sign the summer was wasted.
What to Watch in the First Ten Days
- Which part of the day the difficulty clusters around, by time rather than by subject.
- Whether hard moments happen with instructions, with peers, or during unstructured transitions.
- How your child looks in the first thirty minutes at home, which often says more than the school report does.
Bring that to your team in week three rather than waiting for a conference in October. Early adjustments are smaller adjustments.
Start Building Classroom Success With Achieve ABA Therapy Group
If you want help turning this list into a plan for your specific child, we can start now rather than in September. There is no waitlist, we verify benefits within 48 hours, and the assessment happens in your home.
Reach out to Achieve ABA Therapy Group, or call us at 720-463-9000. You can also begin with our intake form, and pediatricians or school staff can send a referral.
Frequently Asked Questions
How early should we start preparing?
Six weeks is a good target for skill practice, and longer if paperwork is involved. Evaluations, IEP meetings, and insurance authorizations all move on institutional timelines, so June is not too early to make the first phone call.
My child does not have a diagnosis yet. Can we still prepare?
Yes, and every strategy in this article is appropriate for any child who finds these skills hard. If you are also pursuing answers, our evaluation team can explain the process, and a school Child Find referral can run at the same time since the two determinations are separate.
Does Universal Preschool work for a child with autism?
It can. Every child in the year before kindergarten is eligible for funded hours, and children with an IEP are placed through their Administrative Unit based on what the IEP says. Talk to your AU early, because placement decisions are made there rather than through the general matching rounds.
How long should my five-year-old be able to sit?
There is no single right answer, and comparing your child to a classroom average is rarely useful. Compare them to their own baseline from three weeks ago. Steady growth from four minutes to seven is meaningful progress, whatever the room expects.
Can we start ABA just for school preparation?
Services are built around medically necessary goals rather than a school calendar, but classroom-relevant skills like following instructions, tolerating waits, and functional communication are common treatment targets. Your BCBA can weight the plan toward them during the summer.
Should I tell the teacher about the diagnosis?
That is your decision, and there is no obligation either way. What consistently helps is sharing the practical information: how your child communicates, what helps, and what escalates a hard moment. Most teachers can work with that even without a label.
Sources:
- Colorado Department of Education, Child Find Directory. https://www.cde.state.co.us/cdesped/childfinddirectoryinfo
- Colorado Department of Education, Child Find for Children Ages 3 Through 5. https://ed.cde.state.co.us/cdesped/childfindpreschoolsped/child-find-for-children-ages-3-through-5-years-old
- Colorado Department of Early Childhood, Colorado Universal Preschool. https://cdec.colorado.gov/universal-preschool-colorado
- Colorado Department of Early Childhood, Universal Preschool Family Information. https://cdec.colorado.gov/universal-preschool-family-information
- Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, Pediatric Behavioral Therapies. https://hcpf.colorado.gov/pediatric-behavioral-therapies
- Colorado Department of Education, Reduced Academic Calendar Information. https://ed.cde.state.co.us/cdeedserv/reducedacademiccalendar