Today, I’m thrilled to introduce my friend Sharon from How to Get Organized at Home. She always has great advice when it comes to organizing, decluttering, and reducing stress. She has some fantastic back to school organization ideas that she’s going to share with us. Here’s Sharon’s post:
Getting everything ready for school and keeping it organized is no simple task! With a never-ending amount of school supplies, which you need to buy and organize ready for the start of the new school term, knowing how to organize your family’s back to school supplies will make this process easier.
Keeping everything organized and knowing what you need and what you still need to purchase, is often more difficult than any person pre-school could ever imagine, from stationary to clothes and backpacks, the list can seem to go on forever.
The Essential Guide To Organizing Back To School Supplies
You must start with an amount of money that you can afford to spend on supplies, without this you won’t be prepared to know what you can or can’t afford. It can help to determine the essentials and what are luxury items on the list of supplies, often your school will provide a list of the important things they want each child to have.
It is important to talk the items through with your child, there is no point buying something they don’t like because they won’t use the item and it will be a waste of money.
Create a list of the things that you need to buy, identify the child by having separate lists, they might have similar needs but it is important to identify the individual needs of your children.
Storing Your Back To School Supplies
You need to find ways to store the items when they are at home, this makes keeping things organized easier as everyone will know where things belong.
Organizing with colourful labels makes it easier to put things away in the correct place, if your children have yet to learn to read taking pictures of the items can help them identify the right place for where items belong.
Don’t forget they will need some supplies at home too; there are not many times that children come home with no homework, if they know where their supplies are then it makes the process a lot easier. I always bought supplies so that I had a store of the most used items, it might surprise you at the amount of times that they can suddenly remember a project that is due the next day and you have to provide all the supplies.
It’s Never To Soon To Teach Organization Skills
Teaching your children organization skills will help them learn and develop as they grow, encourage them to have a planner of some kind so they are able to look at their day and to know what they need to do. Children can’t remember everything and it is important that they have ways to help them too, the same that you have a planner and a to–do list; children also need reminding of their routines and schedules, which they need to learn.
My daughter had the biggest problem remembering lists of tasks, this was due to her dyslexia, she would forget the middle chores, so it was easier to write things down and then she could tick them off when she had completed the item, this reduced her stress and mine at her not remembering what she needed to do.
Making items easily identifiable is a great tip; something in an odd corner can make an item stand out allowing them to find an item quickly and easily in amongst a group of similar items.
Therefore, it is important in helping your child with their organization and getting ready for the new school term, it can help to reduce their anxiety and stress too and having homes ready for these items can make organizing them feel like a natural process of putting them where they belong.
Thanks to Sharon for the great back to school organization ideas! If you’d like to read more of Sharon’s organizing tips, be sure to visit her at How to Get Organized at Home.
