Back to school can seem like back to the same old grind.

But the new school year also offers kids a chance to start something new. And the benefits of trying something new—at any time of year—are high, says Robyn Silverman, a child and teen development specialist.

Another word for trying out. Find more ways to say trying out, along with related words, antonyms and example phrases at Thesaurus.com, the world's most trusted free thesaurus. Tagged: Lifestyle, get out of your rut, things to do, trying new things. Related and Popular. The 5 Best Products for Dry Skin The 5 Best Products for Oily Skin The 5 Best Hyaluronic Acid Serums. Experience stores, make way for try-out stores: Apple's retail stores, with their elaborate try-out facilities, saw record sales during the last quarter of 2006, posting revenues of USD 1.1 billion.The company opened five new stores during the quarter, for a total of 170 retail stores. Almost 28 million TRYSUMERS visited the Apple stores in those 3 months, which works out to 13,000 customers.

When we try new things, Silverman says, “You learn what you don’t like. You learn what you love. You learn how you learn.” And when all those things converge, says Silverman, we discover something even more important: “what our passions are.”

So how can parents encourage kids to get out of old ruts, and try something different?

Elementary age kids, Silverman says, need concrete examples. To help them understand the value of trying something, she’ll often ask kids to think about their favorite thing or person–and then remind them that “if you had never tried that, you would have no idea it was one of your favorites.” This reframes trying new things as an opportunity, not just a challenge.

Parents can help kids step out by encouraging them to name their worries, but also to name what might help them overcome their fears. And once kids come up with a plan to overcome their fears, Silverman says, it’s important for parents to let kids do as much on their own as they can, like asking a teacher for more information about an upcoming trip. “If you’re doing it for them,” Silverman says, “They’re getting second hand information. They need to hear with their own ears, and speak with their own mouth.”

Trying Out New Stuff Near Me

By middle school, Silverman says, kids have more experience. And some of those experiences haven’t been so good. So many of the fears kids have may be due to things that didn’t go well in the past. Parents can encourage kids to keep trying new things by helping them work through fears that are based in the past – and reminding kids how things are different now: “What kind of skills, gifts, or perspectives have you gained since then?”

By high school, Silverman points out, kids may be getting pigeon-holed by the activities they’ve already chosen. But they’re still young, and still have a lot to learn, both about the world and themselves. Parents can help them keep learning by asking, “What do you wish you could try?” and then helping kids come up with strategies to find space in life to start something new.

The goal is to help them try enough new things to come up with the answer to some much bigger questions that can hopefully guide their lives: “Where would you like to spend your time? Where do you find your joy?”—by Carey Wallace

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I don’t want to mislead anyone here. This corner of the website—“New Stuff”—is not a resurrection of The Far Side daily cartoons. (Well, not exactly, anyway—like the proverbial tiger and its stripes, I’m pretty much stuck with my sense of humor. Aren’t we all?) The thing is, I thoroughly enjoyed my career as a syndicated cartoonist, and I hope, in spirit at least, we had some laughs together. But after fifteen years of meeting deadlines, well, blah blah blah … you know the rest. The day after I retired from syndication, it felt good not to draw on a deadline. And after moving on to other interests, drawing just wasn’t on my to-do list. Things change. But then a few years ago—and returning to the subject at hand—­something happened in my life, and it started with a clogged pen.

Despite my retirement, I still had intermittent connections to cartooning, including my wife’s and my personal Christmas card. Once a year, I’d sit myself down to take on Santa, and every year it began with the same ritual: me cursing at, and then cleaning out, my clogged pen. (Apparently, the concept of cleaning it before putting it away each year was just too elusive for me.) As problems go, this is admittedly not exactly on the scale of global warming, but in the small world of my studio, it was cataclysmic. Okay, highly annoying.

So a few years ago—finally fed up with my once-loyal but now reliably traitorous pen—I decided to try a digital tablet. I knew nothing about these devices but hoped it would just get me through my annual Christmas card ordeal. I got one, fired it up, and lo and behold, something totally unexpected happened: within moments, I was having fun drawing again. I was stunned at all the tools the thing offered, all the creative potential it contained. I simply had no idea how far these things had evolved. Perhaps fittingly, the first thing I drew was a caveman.

The “New Stuff” that you’ll see here is the result of my journey into the world of digital art. Believe me, this has been a bit of a learning curve for me. I hail from a world of pen and ink, and suddenly I was feeling like I was sitting at the controls of a 747. (True, I don’t get out much.) But as overwhelmed as I was, there was still something familiar there—a sense of adventure. That had always been at the core of what I enjoyed most when I was drawing The Far Side, that sense of exploring, reaching for something, taking some risks, sometimes hitting a home run and sometimes coming up with “Cow tools.” (Let’s not get into that.) But as a jazz teacher once said to me about improvisation, “You want to try and take people somewhere where they might not have been before.” I think that my approach to cartooning was similar—I’m just not sure if even I knew where I was going. But I was having fun.

So here goes. I’ve got my coffee, I’ve got this cool gizmo, and I’ve got no deadlines. And—to borrow from Sherlock Holmes—the game is afoot.

Again, please remember, I’m just exploring, experimenting, and trying stuff. New Stuff. I have just one last thing to say before I go: thank you, clogged pen.

—Gary Larson