Family getting ready to go to school

5 Top tips for the morning school run

Lizz Banks
Authored by Lizz Banks
Posted: Wednesday, March 17, 2021 - 17:42

After nearly three months of home-schooling, I had forgotten the chaos of the school run! I started back last week with the best intentions and quickly realised after the first few days that snoozing my alarm for 10 minutes made a huge difference in the level of rushing around! So here are my 5 tops tips that I have learnt this week to try and make the school run go as smoothly as possible.

  1. Set expectations – Now my children could spend about an hour and a half eating their breakfast, which is brilliant for a lazy weekend but not so good on a school day. My children are 6 and 4 so are just learning about telling the time, but whenever they sit up for breakfast I point them towards the digital clock and tell them that they have until a certain time to eat. I try to give them 5-minute and 2-minute warnings as well. They know what time we need to leave the house so they also know how long they have to brush their teeth, get dressed and gather their belongings. My children seem to respond really well to having the times laid out for them and it actually helps me get myself sorted in time too!
  2. Be Prepared – This seems like a bit of an obvious one but I think it’s one that is easy to let slip and can make a real difference to how the morning runs. I try to make sure that I have all of the school uniforms laid out ready for them in the morning, for older children you could incorporate this into an evening routine where the children themselves get their uniform and everything they need out and ready the night before. Over lockdown, I managed to have a good sort out of all our storage units and we now have one big draw where all of the school bags now live. Having everything in one place makes it super easy to find everything in the morning (as long as they have put everything straight away when they got home the night before…).
  3. Have an up-to-date calendar where everyone can see it – Remembering who needs a packed lunch or pe kit on which day can get very confusing, especially when you have multiple children! Spending ten minutes on a Sunday writing what you need each day will be a real help as you all move through the week.
  4. Give children tasks they are responsible for – This will vary depending on the age of the child, but I think it’s so important to teach children how to become independent at an early age. When my son needed to take a snack to school, I made it his responsibility to remember to pack it in the morning. He really loved that this was his special job, the first week I needed to remind him a lot, but he soon picked it up and proudly grabbed his apple from the fruit bowl each morning. Other things they can take responsibility for are making sure they have brushed their teeth, getting their bags together or checking the daily calendar to see what’s on that day.
  5. Have a school comforter – Most people associate comforters with younger children, but I have found that with all the changes with being in and out of school and the anxiety about being away from me and the home, my 6-year-old has found a comforter really valuable! We have three versions of the paw patrol character ‘Marshall’ who is my son's faithful school companion. The anxiety about going to school can start from the moment they wake up in the morning and we have mornings where we have needed to stop what we are doing to reassure him about going back to school. I think it’s so important to give them time to talk about their worries properly and find that these worries always start to come out right when you are rushing the most. So trying to make your child happier about actually going to school can help make the school mornings much nicer.

 

If you have any other tips  I would be really grateful to hear them 

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