I've been focusing a lot this week on getting your kids ready for back to school. I've shared deals on back to school supplies, helped you save money and your sanity when shopping for clothes for your kids, offered some great back to school lunch ideas, and shared tips for making your child's first week back to school extra special! Now it's time to share some tips for helping you be successful when your kids go back to school.
If your household is anything like mine, this time of year is absolutely crazy. For us, the kids are settling into a new routine with new teachers and new classes. It's also soccer season which means that games are often going on during dinner time (and dinner prep time). Add in other after school activities and life can seem quite crazy!
With very little extra work and some organization skills, you can start this school year off on the right foot!
1. Create an evening routine.
Getting your morning off on the right foot starts the night before. When your kids have their homework done, their backpacks packed, lunches made, and clothes laid out, it takes the guesswork and the craziness out of the morning! Creating an evening routine allows mornings to run without all the unexpected snafus (i.e. children without clean socks, dirty uniforms, no lunches, etc). Create a checklist for each of your kids and set a timeframe for them to accomplish the tasks. One to two weeks before school starts, introduce your evening routines to the family and have them start implementing them. By the time school starts, this will be second nature. {If you're not sure how to create an evening routine, check out Make Over Your Evenings by Crystal Paine. This was so helpful for our family!}
2. Develop a morning routine.
Everyone in your family needs a morning routine! It will look different for each person depending on what they need to do. The basics include eating breakfast, getting dressed, making beds, brushing teeth, brushing hair, washing their face and putting their lunch in their bookbag. You may want to add family devotions, a chore or two, or whatever else your child needs to accomplish before heading to school. If you have a child who wears glasses and constantly forgets to put them on before school like one of my kiddos, add that to their morning routine. You can print this off, laminate it, and let your child check off each thing with a dry erase marker or you can use 3×5 cards for each task and have a place to put the cards once the task is completed. Either way, kids will function better each morning knowing exactly what is expected of them and you won't find yourself saying the same things over and over! Just like the evening plan above, if you start practicing your morning routine a week or two before school starts, you'll find that by the time school starts, the routines are second nature! {And just like with the Evening Routine, Crystal Paine created Make Over Your Mornings to help you develop a Morning Routine. It's a 14 day course that was also soo helpful for our family!}
3. Make a meal plan!
Meal planning is one of the best things you can do to keep yourself sane during busy seasons in life, yet, they're often the first things to go out the window when life gets crazy. Take some time now to sit down and create a meal plan for the month of August. These are the 5 cookbooks we use for meal planning!
4. Get organized!
Now is the time to come up with a plan for tackling papers, coordinating schedules and getting things done around the house. If you're looking for some help, you've come to the right place. 🙂
Here are a few of my favorite organizing resources:
- Day Designer (this is the planner that I use and it has literally saved my sanity!)
- 10 Steps to Organized Paper by Lisa Woodruff
- Unstuffed by Ruth Soukup
- Drowning in Clutter? by Dana White
5. Create memories!
Make the most of the time you have between now and the start of school to create some memories with your kids. Do something fun and out of the ordinary (we had a whipped cream fight last week). Visit a place in your area that you haven't been to before! Camp out in your backyard. Stay up late and have a movie marathon! You don't have to spend a lot of money to create fun memories with your kids, but it's easier to do a few crazy things when your whole family doesn't have to be up by 6:30 am the next morning for school. Ask your kids to each share one thing they'd like to do as a family before school starts. If they say Disney World, it's probably not going to happen, but you may be surprised at what they request. Things like a family game night, smores in the microwave or around a fire pit, and a family movie night are regularly requested by my kids!
I know that all families are different. Some moms are dreading the day that their kids head off to school while other moms are counting down the days! I'm sure that there are plenty of moms that fall somewhere in between those two extremes. Whatever the case is for your family, if you start planning now, you'll be prepared when the time comes!
Leave a Reply