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If your morning are anything like ours than you are repeating the same things over and over again!
“Brush your teeth”
“Put on your socks”
“Where is your backpack?”
So last year in the spirit of raising kids who someday will be able to function in the real world I created a magnetic whiteboard for each child with their morning, after school and evening routines. I also added their school schedule and what they need for each day- if Monday is library day than Do you have your books to return?
To Create this Board
I purchased a simple magnetic whiteboard from Amazon- similar to here. The setup includes school specials that stay every year – Gym, Library, Art and Music. I printed them on Avery labels 5162 that you can download here. I then glued pieces of magnet to card stock and stuck the stickers on them and viola a visually pleasing kids schedule that I can change as my child’s schedule changes. And since it has different areas to put in sports, after school classes and any play dates that are scheduled.
I also typed up a general morning, after school and evening schedule and attached it to the board so that when the kids come into the kitchen I can simply point at the schedule and ask if everything is done is done rather than ask all the questions over and over and over again……a simple “is everything done?” will suffice.
Now if your children are not reading yet you will need clip art pics to help them through this. You can download a picture schedule here.
I have found that putting this in a spot where it is visual during the morning routine has helped us tremendously to cut down on the yelling and ordering and simply ask questions about the status of the list. This helps the child to learn responsibility and take pride in doing things themselves. It also helps me to just help them along versus strong arm doing it for them (memory of me shoving a sneaker on a foot pretty hard is coming back to me…..) Ours is located in our kitchen in full view of the kids while they eat breakfast.
