Helping Kids to Get and Stay Organized

With the new school year well underway, you might be dealing with some organizational issues when it comes to your kids. During the first week or two of school, children are often excited about the new year and tend to keep themselves well-organized at first. Once the work starts to pile up and the notebooks and highlighters start getting some heavy use, however, all bets are off. If your children are finding it hard to keep their things organized, here are some tips on how to help:

• Install adjustable closet rods to keep school clothes in order
  If your children are in elementary school, it’s quite possible that they can’t reach their hangers easily. This means that they’ll be pulling neatly hung shirts and pants off of the hangers, stretching out the clothing and maybe breaking the hangers. Installing a lower rod to hold school clothes can go a long way in helping your child to keep her clothing in good repair. It also reduces your role in helping her to get ready in the morning.

• Come up with effective routines for the morning and after school
  Now that we’re a few weeks into the school year, it’s easy to see where the routines get hung up. Do you have too many showers going in the morning, and someone is left with cold water? Switch things around so that one or more people shower at night, instead. Is homework being left until too close to bedtime? Set an earlier time to begin. Are the kids forgetting to give you field trip permission slips, tests that need to be signed, and all the rest? Set up a paper workstation that they must stop at each afternoon on their way in the door.

• Tweak your homework workspaces if necessary. How does this area of your home look?
  Is it a mishmash of pens, pencils, paper and paper clips? Or is it well-organized? If it’s the latter, congratulations; you have stumbled onto a system that works! If it’s the former, however, you have some work to do. It’s difficult to get homework done without the proper tools, and if the kids can’t find what they need, that’s no more effective than not having the items in the first place. You can buy an assortment of desk organizers to help keep small items under control. You could also assign a bin to each child to keep his or her homework tools in; when homework time is over, the assorted implements get put back into the bin and stored away until the next day.

• Help kids come up with ways to keep track of assignments
  Depending on your child’s age and grade, this could range from a homework folder to an app on a smartphone. While many children will resist, it’s usually necessary for kids to write down assignments as they come up. Go shopping for a student planner; the great thing about shopping now is that they are likely to be on clearance! Look for one that appeals to your child and help him use it properly for a week or so before turning the responsibility over to him.

Remember that good organization skills will follow your child throughout his life. Work on helping him to get organized now and you’ll see the fruits of your labor in the years to come.