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Canadians will spend about $4.5 billion on back to school this year, roughly $600 to $750 per kid, which is a staggering number! 5 spots can spiral out of control at lightning speed if you don’t plan for them or contain them. But if they are, it makes the school year, the student, and the parents much more organized and calm. And the good news is, we can do this for under $30 per solution, and each one takes seconds to implement.
The Fridge Door
Lots of fridge doors across the country are doing eight jobs badly. Housing the hockey schedule, a permission slip from last spring, three flyers, old photos, and a collection of useless magnets. When everything is posted, nothing is visible, which is how a field trip form goes unsigned for two weeks when it’s been sitting in plain sight.
Here’s what to do: strip all it. Then put up one magnetic dry erase calendar with a six-week layout or, a one-week layout if you prefer, and make it the only thing on the door. This at-a-glance solution means you see the whole stretch at once. The rule that makes it work: if it is not on the board, it is not happening. Harsh, but it ends the “you never told me” argument permanently.
This weekly dry-erase board offers a tall, spacious writing area, making it easy to map out tasks, appointments and to-dos for the week ahead.
There are also higher-tech solutions to keeping dates organized that don’t involve the fridge, such as the Skylight Digital Calendar, which gets rave reviews (but does come at an investment).
Or the analog versions that hearken back to the 80s and 90s sitting in a kitchen but worked oh-so-well: full-page, spiral-bound agenda books.
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Piles of Paper
School paper arrives daily, and without going through your kid’s backpack, it can add up into a frightening clump of permission slips, freshly graded assignments and tests for you to review, crumpled up inside.
To keep permission slips, forms, papers, projects, and everything in between organized, pick up an accordion folder for papers and art projects, get one 13-pocket accordion file per child, and label the pockets by subject for your child (e.g. science, math) as well as any tasks you need to do (e.g. Sign and Return, Pay For, Keep/File, Calendar, Review, etc). Take a moment to action the paper in there once a week and review anything with your kid/kids weekly, and you’ll stay on top of the school year with much more ease.
All that Air Space in Lockers
A locker is essentially a tall, empty box, so everything amasses into a heap at the bottom, and the backpack becomes the roving storage system instead. That is how kids end up carrying the a ton of books and other things on their backs all year.
A 4-tier foldable locker shelf can sit in a locker and requires no tools – just less than a minute of time to put in place (zero installation required – it’s folding!). This is a brilliant way to keep books, lunches, tech, and shoes organized in an otherwise challenging space.
You can also add a locker accessories kit with a magnetic whiteboard and mirror for the small stuff.
This is not just about tidiness. The Canadian Chiropractic Association says a loaded backpack should be no more than 10% of your kid’s body weight. Do the math for your child! Weigh that bag sometime. You might be unpleasantly surprised.
Kids’ Routines
The whole summer, schedules have been totally off. Then, a couple of days before school starts, it’s back to routines…and back to the arguing about bedtimes or an extra ten minutes to do this or that. Any parent knows this struggle.
The best way to get kids used to routines again is to use a visual timer. It has a 60-minute timer and lets you set how long you want a task to take. This shows your kids exactly how much time is left and they can watch it count down while they work. So you can set a homework timer for 20 minutes, or an eat breakfast timer, a get dressed timer, a tidy up timer…you get the idea. In fact, many adults love this timer as well!
Snacks
Packing lunch at 11 PM or 7 AM means making a lot of decisions when you have the least amount of energy.
Load a set of clear bins with adjustable dividers with pre-approved grab-and-go options and take that snack cupboard from a bunch of boxes buried on an efficient container stocked with their favourites for very simple lunch-making. After grocery shopping, pop the snacks into a defined section, and check before grocery shopping so you can see what to refill. My snack bin has been a big time saver for me when it comes to making lunches.
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