Help your Kindergartner Get Organized

Visiting a different country can be startling. Suddenly ordering a meal and negotiating traffic have become difficult tasks. Yet, with enough time, those tasks would become as straightforward as they are at home.

Being able to organize and interpret information into recognizable patterns allows us to forget about how much information we receive every day and focus on what we are trying to get done. Being a kindergartner must be a lot like stepping off the plane in a new country, a world overflowing with new information. Organization, like any other skill, is teachable to kids but requires practice, support, and patience. Here are a few ideas to help your kindergartner get organized.

Create a household schedule

Organizational skills translate the chaos of daily life into manageable chunks that allow us to achieve our goals throughout the day.  A great way to demonstrate this for a child is to create a household schedule. The household schedule should be displayed prominently and be easy to read. Updating and reviewing the schedule consistently also can help connect the outcome of a routine to an organizational strategy.

Help organize school

Figuring out how to get ready for school, remembering homework and scheduling when any given task needs to be done can be challenging for kids. It takes time to learn how to prepare for a day, document what happened and create tasks for yourself to follow up on. Teaching kids how to organize going to and returning from school helps them learn the valuable skills of preparing yourself to accomplish future tasks and the daily habits that can facilitate this process.

Everything has a place

Reinforce how to organize daily life by ensuring that everything has a place. It helps kids understand the context of activities, such as how to transition from play time to dinner. It can also help prepare them to visualize activities and what tools are required for them.

Help kids create their own organizational structure

Collecting has always been a popular hobby. It is a great, long term way to explore an interest. Kids obviously have a lot of interests and while most of them are fleeting, others stay around long enough to develop a small collection. Whether it be dinosaur toys, coins, playing cards, rocks or anything else, following a child's passion to a point where organization becomes needed is an opportunity for kids to develop their own beneficial organizational structure. No matter how they sort it, it is always fun to help kids create their own organization for their collections.

Teaching kindergartners about organizing can feel like a constant battle but it is a fundamental skill for being able to navigate the relentless information we are exposed to every day in modern life. Integrating these strategies can help kindergartners observe and practice the organizational skills at home that will allow them to achieve their goals as they grow older.

The teachers and staff at the Montessori School of Flagstaff Westside Campus work with students and their families to ensure they are organized for the day and week ahead, including making schedules and using folders and labels to stay on task.  To learn more about our kindergarten program, contact us today.