Your rising high schoolers are going to have to juggle a lot this year. There are multiple subjects, teachers, assignments, schedules, notices, and so on, and keeping them all straight might be a challenge. If your teen could use a little help getting things organized, doing so right from day one is important. Below is a tool that might be helpful to your student and to you too! Who couldn’t benefit from being a little more organized!
Purchase a 3-ring binder for each subject, a set of stacking desk-top files, colored paper, colored sticky notes, and a set of colored markers.
Select one color for each subject that your teen will be studying, and insert a sheet of that color into the cover of a binder and a strip of the same color into the spine of that binder. If your student is using just one binder for all subjects, create a different section for each subject and use the same color coordinating system as above. For example, history is yellow, math is green, science is blue, etc. If allowed, cover each text book in the same coordinating color.
Next, set the stacking files on your student’s desk and add a strip of each color to the front of each file, so that there is a rainbow of files that coordinate with each differently colored subject binder. Your teens can keep everything related to that subject in the same color file, such as hand-outs, notices, assignments, etc.
Colored sticky notes and colored markers can be used to create subject tags in planners, to attach to a calendar, to a bulletin board over the desk, or any other means used to keep track of due dates or other important reminders. Just remember to use the coordinating color for each subject.
If your children are using a laptop, tablet or other device rather than a textbook or workbook, simply change font colors or even file colors, just use the same coordinating color for each subject.
This system will take a wee bit of work to set up initially, but once in place it can be a really handy way to stay organized throughout the year and a super simple way of finding things quickly.