5 Ways To Help Children Build Organizational Skills

Whether you’re an organizational powerhouse or can’t find your glasses when they’re on your head most days, you know that raising children with solid organizational skills will benefit them in the long run.

Today we’re offering you 5 simple ways to help your children (be they in your classroom or your own home) develop some basic but valuable organizational skills. We know that building these habits isn’t always the most fun thing for kids, but we’ve tried to provide some ways to make them a bit more enjoyable for everyone involved.

Let’s get to it!

Let Them Try  Some Checklists

Staying organized by using a checklist may be a great idea for your child. Deciding on a task or set of tasks that they’ll complete and getting excited when they check things off of the list can be a great way to foster action-taking and focus. You can try this with things like chores, daily morning routines (wake up, make your bed, brush your teeth, eat all your breakfast, put your shoes on...).

Start out with short lists (Maybe 3 items) and move up to longer lists.

For older children, the checklist can be super helpful for things like projects, reports, college applications, and job searches.

Give Them A Job When It Comes To The Family Calendar

As a teacher, parent, or guardian you’re most likely the keeper of the calendar. But giving children the chance to play a role in the calendar can make them more likely to respect and follow it. If it really doesn't matter when the house gets vacuumed and the choice is between Wednesday and Thursday or you don’t care if you go to Target before the farmers market,  let the child whose chore that is decide. Then when they stick to it, be sure to encourage them for the great choice of date and the follow-through.

The goal here is not to give up control of the calendar to a child. It’s just great to model the use of a calendar and encourage decision making and follow through.

Reward Awesome Backpack Checks

We’ve all seen them: The bottomless pit or great abyss backpacks. Full of crumpled papers, broken pencils, and the occasional rogue cap-less marker… But routine backpack checks can change that.

The only issue? Most children hate backpack checks. They can feel judged and condemned when it looks like a Mardi Gras parade aftermath in their bag.

So how can we make backpack checks less loathed?

How about daily backpack checks (so things don’t go too far off the rails…) with a reward system (maybe stars on a sheet of printer paper on the fridge?).

Rewarding organized, clean backpack checks can help kids to form great habits and stay on track throughout the week.

Help Them Design Their Own Home-From-School Routine

Just like the calendar suggestion above, the focus here is not on giving up control of everything when it comes to a home-from-school routine. However, letting a child decide if they should have a snack break before or after their Math homework can feel empowering for them. Letting them decide if they want screen time before or after dinner can allow them to learn delayed gratification without your needing to sit down and explain it each time.

As far as organization, having a child plan their time, even parts of it, can help their reasoning skills and lead to a more thoughtful approach to time management down the road.

Get Them Involved In Weekly Meal Planning

Finally, getting children involved in planning and shopping for weekly meals can be a great way to teach them about the steps in meal preparation. 

What steps exist in your weekly meal prep? You need to make a shopping list, no doubt. Shop, prepare, cook food, serve food, and store leftovers. Teaching children about each step in this process can be an awesome way to allow them to see things a bit differently.

Suddenly the meal they see before them at dinner is just part of a bigger project and they helped with that project. 

So, maybe you’ll let your child help decide what to cook, allow them to give you input on the shopping list, or let them tell you the next step in preparing the pasta from a checklist of steps you created together.

Whether you focus on your child’s ability to keep things in the proper place, to tackle time management, or to problem solve and make decisions. Each of these pieces can help your child understand organization  and stay organized more often.

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