The start of a new school year brings lots of unavoidable stress. Here are some tips to minimize that Back To School stress! Let’s call these our Back To School Success Tips!
In some ways sending the kids back to school is a relief, but in other ways, the start of a new school year ushers in a whole new round of crazy. At my house, it doesn’t matter how much I prepare and put systems in place to thwart chaos, there’s no way to prepare for the chaos we can’t control.
As parents, we only have so much control, right?
We can make sure my kids pack their lunches.
We can make sure my kids have shoes that they can wear to school.
We can make sure my kids have clean clothes.
We can make sure my kids charge their iPads or phones at night.
We can get my kids out the door and to the bus so they aren’t tardy.
However, some things are not within our scope of control. This list gets longer and longer as our kids get older!
We can’t control the frequency with which coaches send practice schedules, meeting information, or other pertinent information. This is ironic because my husband is now the coach!
We can’t control the crazy people in the car line each day who are incapable of following the agreed upon car line procedures.
We can’t control whether or not our son or sons remembers to get his lunch box out of the refrigerator each morning.
We can’t control the number of forms that come home in backpacks requiring us to sign, write a check, pay on some website or app, and return yesterday.
We can’t control how a kindergartener is going to feel about her socks when it’s time to get in the car.
Anyone else just feel like a lunatic trying to keep up with all the dates, deadlines and other requirements that are blasted at you between orientation and the first few days of school?
I’m going to offer you a few tips for getting through the first few days and the information overload you will experience. I will confess, I don’t always handle this stuff very well. Curve balls, and balls thrown from left field, usually send me into somewhat of a tiz!
Here are a few helpful tips for knocking the first few days of school out of the park! Not sure why I’m into baseball analogies, but let’s just go with it!
Back To School Success Tips – One mom to another!
Declare a home base for school stuff:
The kids back to school means your house is about to be overrun by backpacks, laptops, folders, pencils, etc. Where do these things belong? Where can you keep them day in and day out so that you always know where they are? Do you have a place to hang your backpacks? Where will your kids charge their laptops or use their laptops for homework? If you’re wondering why I keep referencing laptops, my kids attend schools where every child, 3rd-12th grade, are issued a school owned laptop. The first year this was the most ludicrous thing ever. Now it’s grown on me and it’s just part of how we do school, but I sure miss real textbooks!
Find a drawer or a storage bin of some sort and make it the home for the common school supplies your kids may need to do homework. Pens or pencils, markers, crayons, glue stick, scrap paper, etc. If it has a designated place, you’ll always know where to find these items when your emotions are getting heated over math problems that your child has never seen before, but is expected to complete for homework!
Hang hooks or get a basket for your kids to place their backpacks as soon as they walk in the door. Corral these puppies! If not, they’ll end up who knows where and you’ll spend precious minutes searching for them, only to find them on the trampoline or under a bench on your front porch. True story!
Create a backpack/lunch box clean out routine:
Back to school means backpacks are back in business!
Often, backpacks can become black holes for swallowing important documents or homework if we don’t make it a habit of cleaning them out. I hope that you took the time before now to clean out the junk in the bottom of your kids’ backpack if they’re reusing it this year. One year I forgot until the week before school started and found my son’s sweaty middle school gym clothes had been rotting in the bottom of his backpack from June to August! Gross!
My preference is to open and empty as soon as we walk in the door. By doing this, we know what homework needs to be done or papers need to be signed. Or who got written up on the bus 2 weeks ago and never mentioned it to me – also, true story! Much better to see these things at 3 in the afternoon than 7 in the morning! The challenge though is what do you do with all of that paper?
Some will take all the papers out and put them in a bin that you’ll have to go through in a week or two. That might work for you.
I prefer to just get rid of any papers that we don’t need right away. Backpack -> Trash Can/Recycle Bin! One touch! I know we’re never going to sign up for the after school karate thing. We’ll be out of town the day of that education celebration. I have 3 other pieces of paper with the web address for the Behavior Learning Guide! Don’t keep one single piece of paper that you know you’ll never need. Garbage in – Garbage out!
There will be paperwork that you’ll need to keep like user names and passwords for online resources, the teacher’s favorites sheet, XC meet schedules, district calendars, grading policies and the list goes on…Where are you going to put them? I like to keep a file folder with each kids’ name on it. When they bring papers that need to be kept home, I put them in their folder. That way, I know exactly where they are when I need them.
Commit to keeping your calendar updated:
This one is a challenge for me, but so necessary! I have a dry erase calendar hanging on a wall in my kitchen. You can read about it in this post. Any time something with a date or deadline comes through the door, I try to add it to the calendar immediately! If it’s not in the current month, I’ll write it on the chalkboard beside the calendar so I don’t forget about it when the new month comes. I try to keep a paper or digital calendar updated, too, but often it gets stuck in a bag and doesn’t see the light of day for a week or more!
Our household has lots of moving parts, going back to school makes it even crazier! Between 3 kids at 2 different schools, there’s a lot to keep track of! School, sports, social lives, church activities, special requirements for this or that…It’s exhausting just thinking about it! If I didn’t have some visual reminding me when these are going to happen, we’d be in a world of hurt.
One year, when my boys were both in middle school, their summer reading projects were due. Unfortunately for them, both of their parents were going to be out of town on Wednesday and Thursday of that week! So on Monday and Tuesday, we told them that if they wanted help with their project or if they needed any sort of visual aid, they had to work on it while we were both home. Both did well on their projects, but had we not been aware of the totality of everyone’s schedules, they could’ve been in a world of hurt! Turns out, they say they were the most prepared kids in their classes.
What are your best tips for surviving the Back To School chaos?
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