I asked my newsletter subscribers the question: “What is the best strategy you use to organize your kids, help them manage their time, or teach them to be productive?” Here are some of the better responses:
One thing that I taught my children to do while they were still young "and trainable" was to choose the clothes that they were going to wear to school the next day, the night before. In this way, everything was clean & pressed, there was no running around asking for their favorite shirt, etc. Needless to say, I follow this routine myself to this day which I notice is also #54 in your book. ( I don’t know if my children follow this anymore)
Of course everyone has had a "job chart" on their kitchen wall for the chores their children are responsible for each week. As a single parent, my children probably had many more items than a 2 parent family.
- Emptying the trash can & bringing it to the outside container
- Making their beds
- Cleaning their rooms
- Fixing easy meals (after an automobile accident, my children cooked all of our meals for a month)
- Vacuuming
- Laundry (my children were taught early on to sort clothes by: colored, whites, and flimsy)
- Bringing in the mail (lived in rural area and they had to go to the mailbox on the street)
Hope this helps.
Lorraine
To have them break a large school assignment into small, manageable parts and monitor their progress. For example, my 6th graders are required to read a minimum of 1000 pages by 08 November. They first thing we did was move the due date to 01 November, and then calculate how many pages per week were needed to meet the requirement. Then we wrote the number of pages they should have read by the end of each week in the planner that the school provides. Also, by moving the due date and continuing to read until the actual due date, they will do more than what is required to “get by,” which is an important lesson in itself.
Patricia W. (parent of three, ages 13, 11, 11)
I use a control journal and routines to help my children. They check off what they have completed and they always know what they should be doing. They have a morning, after school, and evening checklist in their control journal (It is a place to keep important things…I have one myself).
The evening checklist is especially important because it gets them ready for the next day and there is no fuss in the morning…their launch pad has everything they will need for the day, all ready to go.
I learned this from a very good resource and time saver: the Flylady. I would recommend visiting her website at Flylady.net. She has transformed my life.
Basically, it boils down to this: routines save you.
Kristie L.
My daughter is very active and all her activities come with their own stuff. So in addition to her school back pack which she un-loads and re-loads each evening, she has an activity bag for example right now it is soccer season so she has a bag that is always ready to grab and go for soccer it has her ball, cleats, shingaurds, etc… and when she comes home from practice or a game it gets un-loaded and re-loaded. No more searching for things when we are trying to get out the door!
Gordon
We always used a family calendar on the wall in the kitchen, so they could add events as well as look and see if any family activities were going on before they committed to something. It was like having a mini-planner and getting them started on time organization.
Marilyn K.
