Hello again from me, Nicola, over at My Inner Creative. Welcome back to the new school term! This might be the first year your kids are off to school or an old hand at this, either way the system is still the same, juggling your time and their time! 

I am a mom to a busy 6 and half year old. He has recently started sport – parkour. So managing  my time around his schedule had to be ship-shape and like clockwork or the wheels will come off! 

Planning the school year:

When starting the school year – I find the following is really helpful to start planning:

1. Sports and activities they will be doing
2. School times, classes and teacher names and details
3. School details like phone numbers and emails
4. Stationery lists and book lists.

I also keep a list of lunch box ideas so that I can plan out during the week, and shake up what he might be eating that week. I also make sure I have all the class photo dates, sports days, productions etc. listed down in my future log. If you want to know more about making an effective future log, you can see my post about it here.

As a suggestion to keep your kids in check – is to create a list of things per kid that might be really important and tab the edges of the page and fill in things like:

• Doctors details and emergency contacts and medial history
• Health information
• Immunization reports (if your school needs this)
• Baby sitters and back ups 
• Emergency contacts
• Emergency situation plan (we do this in New Zealand because of all the earthquakes, we need to be prepared) – also include a recent photo of your child.
• Regular take away menu places when you just can cook dinner! 

Managing the Kids schedules weekly:

You can grab the free weekly schedule printable here

When wrangling kids – especially mine – I find making time on a Sunday night, to plan out the week really helps, the most important for me is meal planning, and sporting events. 

I keep this running next to my own schedule so that I can make sure that everything ticks smoothly.

Another great way to keep track of the schedules and meal planning is to use small sticky notes! This means you can move those schedules around and not be too worried if something changes.

Follow here to see how I created these spreads!