Top 5 Tips to Make This an Organized School Year

Are you overwhelmed during the school year? Do you long for the laid back, spontaneous days of summer to last for ever? Well, it’s time for school to start and there is a way to make this the best school year yet! How’s that you ask? Get Organized. That’s right, when you are organized things just flow smoother. Being organized gives your kids a sense of security.

Here are my top 5 tips to make this an organized school year:

Tip 1 - Create a family calendar.

A central location where all of the family’s activities are posted is a great way to make sure the week and month go smoothly. This is the place where you will write down doctor appointments, soccer practice, gymnastics meets and social events.

You can assign each family member their own pen color and make the older children responsible for writing things down.

Having a family calendar will help tremendously when making doctor or dentist appointments and will help prevent overlapping. How many times have you had to cancel an appointment because you realized you couldn’t possibly be in two places at once?

Tip 2 – Create a menu.

Knowing ahead of time what’s for dinner will make life so much easier and will help you feel more in control of your day. If you know in the morning that you are having steak for dinner, you can put out the meat to thaw. You’ll also know what needs to be bought if you are out of anything.

If you look at your calendar for the week and you see that you have a very full week, you plan some simple meals and even some take-out nights.

I also like to plan out breakfast. This ensures that we can have some healthy meals to start off our day. Some mornings we just have cereal and that’s perfectly okay. I happen to love cereal and have been known to eat it for dinner a time or two!

Tip 3 – Create an organized space for your children to do their homework.

Whether it’s at the kitchen table or a desk in their bedroom, your kids need to have a space to do their homework. When my kids were first starting out doing their homework they did it at the kitchen table. I had a cabinet nearby that housed all the supplies they needed. They knew where to go if they needed a pencil, pen, crayon, ruler or pencil sharpener.

This year, we are setting up a space in their room. Their homework is getting harder and they need a place with no distractions. You can either set-up a desk in their room and put a lamp on top and school supplies nearby or buy them a lap desk that they can use while sitting on their bed.

Whatever your set-up is, you won’t hear your kids saying, “Where’s a pencil?” That can make homework time stressful if you are searching high and low for a pencil.

Tip 4 – Create a system for school papers of every kind.

What do you do with your kids’ school papers and notes from the school? There are several different ways you can handle this.

As far as their school papers, my kids’ teachers usually want them to hold on to the ones for the week so they can look over them and study for the test. Putting together a simple binder with dividers will make the perfect spot for their papers. When it’s test time, they can go to the right section and study away!

You can also file their school papers if you want to hold on to them for the year. Just make sure that at the end of the year you go through them and throw most of it away. Actually throw it in the recycling bin!

Also, my kids come home with school notes after school notes and it can get a little overwhelming. For simple notes with an activity that has a date and time, I jot it down on the family calendar and then write down in my day planner what I need to buy or bring for the event. Otherwise, I have a filing system where those papers go. Most of them I end of getting rid of because after I read them, there is no need to hold on to it.

Keeping a tight rein on the school paper clutter can help make the school year a little easier.

Tip 5 – Create a limit to the number of activites your kids can participate in.

What I mean by this is try not to over-schedule your kids. Right now our kids are still young, so we have a 1 activity at a time rule. My 2 sons takes gymnastics, my daughter takes acting classes. So, when they come home from school and heard a cool presentation about girl scouts, we tell them they have to pick and that they made a commitment to one activity already.

As your kids get older they can probably handle more. I also believe it depends on the child. Taking control of your time and your family’s schedule will help alleviate a lot of stress during the busy school year.

So there you go! I hope those tips help you out as you prepare for another year. I will be ellaborating on these tips throughout the month and give you more details and show you some products I recommend.

Now go get ready for the school year!