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Organize Your Family Routine
by Suzanne McLoone

Description: Practical tips for organizing your kids' school papers and keeping track of your family's weekly routine.

The start of the school year is very similar to New Year's as far as "resolutions" go. You always swear that this year you are going to do a better job at going through back packs, signing and sending in permission slips for field trips on time, and you will NOT forget to bring in the snack for your child's "Snack Week". Which reminds me, I need to put that into my Outlook calendar! Although you may have the best of intentions for the coming school year, how will this year be different from all those other years you had every intention of making it better than the year before? How can you change your routine to really make it work this time?

Tackling the Papers

I don't know about you but my kids bring home enough flyers, book order forms, class work, and art projects to single handedly fill up the recycle bin! I was driving myself absolutely crazy a couple of years ago trying to manage all of them when I finally came up with a simple solution: our "Family Organizer Board". Mounted to the wall is our foam core family board and attached to the foam core with Velcro are two Poly Project Folders so the kids can put their school papers into the sleeves. This works out perfectly for the kids! After dinner, we go through the folders and I toss away all of the useless flyers, give kudos to pretty pictures and good homework papers, and give the "evil eye" when a bad test score pops up. It's all quite fun! But what about those extracurricular activities?

Handling the Activities

With my husband and I each owning our own business, a junior high student, and a 3rd grader we are everywhere! Who is picking up the boy? When is the orthodontist appointment? Do you have a hockey game tonight? Can you make dinner since I am going to be late? Like most families, trying to figure out where everyone is at any given time is nearly impossible! Although we all had our respective agendas, we didn't necessarily have one big group calendar. Since I already had our family organizer board hanging crooked on the wall, I decided this would be a great place to start. I have labels for each day of the week and we all have a Post-it note color that represents our appointments and activities. So, if my daughter has an orthodontist appointment she writes the time of the appointment on her bright green Post-it note and places it under the day of the week it falls on; then the rest of us follow suit. It makes it very easy to visually see what is going on for the entire week and it helps with my son's handwriting skills as well. To keep it from getting too cluttered, I only keep a week's worth of information on our family board. The remaining future activities go into my Outlook calendar; I go over them on Sunday night and put on the family board what is happening for the week coming up.

This is our second school year using our family organizer board and so far so good! My resolution for this school year to sign those darn permission slips on time!

If you have a suggestion of your own be sure and let us know. For more organizing solutions for your home and family feel free to visit our blog at http://LetsTalkOrganizing.Blogspot.com

Happy Organizing!

Suzanne McLoone
Organizational Empowerment
http://www.LetsTalkOrganizing.com

For over 20 years, Suzanne has been helping organize corporations, home offices, and teachers in Arizona, Scotland, and Canada. For more helpful tips and hints, please feel free to visit her blog at http://letstalkorganizing.blogspot.com.

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