Use That Agenda!

Organization is one of the biggest challenges a middle school student faces. Your child suddenly has to remember where to be, what materials to bring, what work needs to be done and when it is due- with a lot less direct support than he or she is accustomed to. To help students stay organized, many schools issue an agenda at the start of the school year. If your school doesn’t, you should definitely buy a date book for your child to record assignments.

Encourage your child to use his or her agenda every time. Writing things down is a habit, but it’s a very useful one and this is a great time to practice it.

An agenda is also a great tool for parents. It will help you keep your child organized and on task, it can provide an outline to discuss what happened in school each day and it can help you monitor your child’s budding independence. Here are some ways you can use it:

• In the morning
  
  Have the agenda open at the breakfast table. Have your child find each assignment and verify that it is in the proper folder in his or her backpack. Have him or her write down materials or books that need to be brought home that evening in order to study for upcoming tests or work on projects. Make sure the agenda is stowed in his or her backpack after breakfast.
  
  
• In the evening
  
  Have the agenda open at the dinner table. Go over the day, class by class. What did you do in class? What was assigned? When is it due? If it is a project, break things down into sub-tasks and figure out due dates for each task. Have your child record the dates in his or her agenda. Ask about upcoming tests and plan when study times will occur. It is much easier to get your child to agree to sign of IM for an hour to study if he or she has known it was coming for several days.
  
  If an assignment isn’t written down, or is too sketchy to be useful, make your child track down the information. Call a friend, look online, call the teacher if necessary, but push try to find the assignment and get it done. He or she will quickly learn that life will be easier if the agenda is current.
  
  

Getting middle school students to talk about their day can be like pulling teeth, a lot of grunts and groans and painful for everyone. I have found that an agenda is a great vehicle to get conversations going. It is much harder to be evasive to a specific “What does this essay need to be about?” than it is for “What did you do in school today?” The more information you have, the more specific your questions will be and the more complete the answers you receive will be.

Don’t expect your child to like this at first. We all get uncomfortable when someone starts poking around in our clutter. But we also like it when that clutter starts disappearing and we can take pride in being organized. Be patient but be relentless and you will see the rewards very quickly.