Whether you look forward to the start of the school season or dread it, preparing your home for school days will make it easier. Follow these tips to eliminate frantic searches for essential items, school clothes being dropped all over the house, and some of the chaos that accompanies going to or returning from school. In this article, you will find some tips for preparing your home for school days. Read on.
Ideas for Preparing Your Home for School Days:
Start With the Entryway
This is where kids will want to dump their books, coats, boots, and anything else they don’t want to keep with them. Adults also like to drop their keys and purses here.
Outfit the entryway with accessories that make it easy to keep the area organized. Add hooks for coats, a mat for boots, folders for each child’s homework and other papers, and a table big enough to easily hold everything that won’t fit in a tidy container. The table should also hold a bowl for everyone’s keys.
Clearing Out Your Kitchen Cabinets to Prepare Your Home for School Days
Most people don’t leave much time for preparing school lunches, nor do they want to make breakfast into an all-morning job. Clearing out your kitchen cabinets or pantry gives you space to organize new foods and ingredients. When you can easily find everything, you can make breakfast and pack everyone’s lunch in a snap.
What to do with the old food? If the container is still sealed and the items aren’t past their expiration dates, consider donating them to a local food pantry. Otherwise, discard them.
If your cabinets don’t make it easy to organize them, add baskets and extra shelves to fix that. There are many options available to fit a variety of budgets.
Declutter the Kids’ Bedrooms
After a full week of school and activities, kids – like working adults – need to wind down and have fun. This makes it so they won’t normally clean their rooms very well. Add organizational accessories to make the job easier for whoever ends up doing it. Instead of one big toy box, get organizers for each major type of toy so they’re easy to find later. Add a trash can so that old homework or spoiled papers don’t pile up on the desks, or worse, get thrown on the floor. Give each desk a basket or other container to hold pencils and other small items. Finally, give each child a hamper to both contain dirty clothes and make it easier to tell whose clothes are whose come wash day.
Refresh and Organize the Closets
Everyone ends up with clothes they no longer wear. For adults, it’s usually because of changing tastes, but children also grow out of their old outfits. Donate these old items if they’re still in good shape. Replace them with this year’s wardrobe, and organize the new clothes so it’s easy to grab an entire outfit in a few seconds.
Prepare the Homework Area
No matter where your children do their homework, they’ll need supplies. It’s easy enough to provide pencils, and if the child is old enough, a sharpener of his or her own. However, modern schooling often involves technological devices that can easily draw a kid’s attention to everything but homework. Prepare these devices so they won’t run unwanted apps or go to distracting sites during homework time. There are apps that let parents set limits with just a few clicks.
Preparing Your Home for School Days: Creating a Relaxing Area
Tutors recommend that kids unwind for a half hour after they get home from school before starting on homework. Setting up a special area for this, rather than letting them go to their rooms and jump on their game decks, puts you in control of the relaxation activities. Light reading or similar activities keep the brain in “thinking mode” without seeming like more schoolwork.
With these tips, preparing your home for the new school year should be easy. Organizers are easy to get, with options available at all prices. Whether you use baskets from the dollar store or custom-made, built-in organization solutions, the goal is to have a contained place for every type of item. Once you do, getting the kids ready for school will be much easier.
