Tiny Changes Challenge Day 7: His Homework, My Planner

I have a second grader. Mostly, he's really great about doing his homework. He writes it in his planner at school. (His planner is one provided by the school.) He packs his bag. He brings it home. He does homework quickly. He brings it back to school.

Except, every now and then, when he forgets to write it in his planner. Then the work doesn't get done. (Like mother, like son, right?)

Mostly, he doesn't write in his planner because something happened to change his routine at school. When we go over what happened, I realize I'm not going to be able to improve his behavior. For example, they have religion class (with a special bag and no time to grab their planner), so he just has to remember that he has religion homework. But he doesn't remember, and he doesn't go straight back to class to write it down immediately.

For a long time, I was looking up his homework on-line every night. That took forever as the on-line homework program the school uses is clunky. So I started writing everything in my planner every week. But I hated it on my daily entries, because it was FYI only and took up valuable space.

So I put the homework in the corner.

Kabooma! It works.

The lesson here is that some things are truly need-to-know, but that doesn't mean they need the important spaces in your planner.

Etcetera.