5 Tips to Help Your Child Organize
My kids will both be middle schoolers this year. Their school is opening for in-person learning in a few weeks. Today, I bought their school supplies, and it made me realize that I ought to post some of the things I use to help my tutoring students and my own kids stay organized, in case it might help your kids, too. This post might not be relevant if your kids are doing online school this year, but it could be helpful for when they return to school in the future. So, here are 5 tips for helping your child or teen stay organized.
Tip #1: Assign each subject a color
Some schools or grades within a school want students to carry one big zippered binder to all their classes. Others want students to bring a separate binder and possibly a composition or spiral notebook to each class. It’s a good idea to have their subjects organized by different colors.
Purchase book covers, spiral notebooks, composition books, and binders for a subject that are all in that one color. That way, as they’re headed to class or packing their backpack to go home, they can easily grab just what they need. I have seen kids show up to class with the wrong supplies because they have the same colored binders for each class, the colors have no consistency or meaning to them, etc.
Before we hit the store, I asked my kids what color they associated with each subject. It’s interesting how different kids associate “History” with different colors. My son chose red for math, gray for history, green for science, white for English, and yellow for Spanish. The composition notebooks with graph paper that my kids needed for math only came in black and white but they both chose red as the color for math, so they customized the cover with construction and contact paper when we got home.
Tip #2: Color-code their schedules if the classes rotate
The school where many of my students attend has a different schedule every day. They are given a spreadsheet version of their schedule with the names of their classes in the various boxes, all in black and white. In order to know where they’re going next at a quick glance, I create a colored version of their schedules, using the colors they associate with each subject again. I give them a few laminated copies to put in their zippered binder, on the front of their planner, and inside the door of their locker.
Tip #3: Invest in a good planner
Some kids don’t write anything down during school and just look up their assignments online during study hall and again at night to figure out what they have for homework. I prefer a paper planner for several reasons. They can fill it out at the beginning of the week if the teacher posts that far ahead, they can refer to it as they pack their backpacks before going home, and they can physically check things off as they complete them. Plus, they don’t have to keep logging in to check (which can also lead to them wasting time online).
Some of the student planners I saw today in the store were terrible! They showed a week at a time with one box for each day and some lines inside the box where you could write a paragraph.
Better student planners have a column for each day with several boxes going down the column with one box per subject. However, they are often mislabeled in the sense that an older child might not have “Reading” as a subject, there isn’t a label for a class they actually take like “Robotics” or “Yoga,” or the subjects are printed down the side of the page in a different order than the order that the student actually attends the classes (so they will sometimes write the math homework in the science box).
Other planners leave the subject area blank to allow you to fill them in yourself with the correct names and order. However, they make you re-label the subjects every time you turn to a new page. That’s a hassle- especially for a kid who doesn’t like to write things down as it is.
This is why I highly recommend the “Order Out of Chaos” Academic Planner. You can usually get one on the company’s website or on Amazon. These planners are more expensive and have boring covers, but my students usually tape the color-coded, laminated version of their schedule to the front, anyway. They have some nice features like space for planning the hours after school and during the weekend. My favorite feature is that you only have to write the subjects for each period ONCE (and in whatever order you want), instead of filling them in again each week.
Tip #4: Get a Homework Folder
If your child’s school doesn’t already have a system for homework, I recommend you buy a homework folder. It needs to have 2 pockets, doesn’t need prongs, can be cardboard or plastic, and can be in any color. Label one pocket “To Do” and the other “Turn In.” That folder needs to go with them to every class, home each afternoon, and back to school each morning. Kids don’t like to carry their binders home each night, so if they don’t have a homework folder, they may realize they left their English worksheet in their English binder in their locker. It is so helpful to have all of their assignments in one spot. No more digging through binders at turn-in time, either. There should only be a few papers in their homework folder each day, so they can quickly locate assignments to turn in.
TIp #5: Clean Out and Re-stock at the End of Each Quarter
All those binders and pencil bags are new, shiny, and well-stocked at the beginning of the year. But, as time goes on, students will struggle to find a pencil, need to borrow paper from a friend, not be able to find things in the sea of loose papers within their binder or backpack, etc.
Take some time at the end of each quarter to re-organize. Have your child take out all loose papers and sort them. Repair ripped holes in paper with tape and a hole-puncher. Other papers may need to be 3-hole-punched for the first time. Clip all papers into their binders in the correct sections.
Throw out any no-longer-needed papers. However, always check with the teacher first! Have your child send a quick Email (“Is it okay to recycle all the papers related to the fiction essay unit we did, or will I need those in the future?”). Also ask your child what supplies they need to have restocked (lined paper, graph paper, pencils).
Final thoughts...
If you implement these ideas, I believe your child will have more of a chance of bringing the correct supplies home and to class, turn completed work in on time, know what they need to do for homework without wasting time online, etc.
Here is a great post by Additude Magazine about helping your child with homework. These tips work with any student, whether they have ADHD or not.
I wish you and your children a great school year!
