My child is struggling 
Now that my child has 
How Can Parents Help Children to Organize and Prioritize Effectively?Many of the following strategies can help children to succeed with academic and leisure activities and provide a strong foundation for future performance during their adult lives.
Organizing Time
- Many parents use a family calendar to record important commitments. Weekly family meetings can help you coordinate everyone’s schedules so that you model good planning and organizational strategies.
- Help your child to select calendars (paper or electronic) that can be updated with commitments and tasks whenever you update the family calendar. Encourage your child to review these calendars daily to anticipate new events.
- Encourage your child to schedule enjoyable activities (e.g., time with friends), along with important obligations.
Organizing Tasks
- Visualizing long-term projects and viewing them as “mental movies” can help children to break complex tasks into manageable chunks. Using a white board or sheet of paper to map tasks into flow-charts is also helpful.
- Encourage your child to write down important tasks in a calendar and to allocate time accordingly. You can teach your child to estimate the time each task will take and to track the time while working. A kitchen timer is a helpful tool for this purpose.
- Help your child to generate lists of tasks for homework or chores and to check off their lists as each task is completed.
Organizing Materials
- An organized workspace helps children to find the materials they need for homework easily and independently. Storing materials in different sections is always helpful. For example, all writing tools should be located together (e.g., pens, pencils, erasers, markers) as should all papers (e.g., blank, ruled, graph).
- Keep reference materials, including calculators, dictionaries, and atlases, close to your child’s homework workspace.
- Help your child to identify a regular time during the week for clearing out and organizing his or her backpack. Work together to make this a pleasant experience so that it becomes a habit!
- Encourage your child to use a brightly colored pocket folder to transport important papers (e.g., homework, permission slips) to and from school so that homework does not get lost.
Prioritizing Tasks
- Help your child to prioritize homework tasks based on due dates, difficulty level or the level of stress he or she is experiencing with the task.
- Encourage your child to list the steps needed to complete long-term projects.
- Help your child to sequence tasks logically. For instance, before looking up vocabulary words in the dictionary, he or she should alphabetize the list first!
Prioritizing Materials
- Teach your child to scan homework and gather materials before starting work so that everything is collected in advance.
- Store the most commonly used items within easy reach in accessible locations.
A common complaint of many children is that they don’t have time to do the things they want to do because they have so much homework! Children can achieve balance in their lives by prioritizing tasks and using strategies to organize time and materials. These strategies can also help to reduce the pressure that students feel due to the volume and pace of their schoolwork in combination with their busy, active lives.
Recommended Resources
- Executive function in education: From theory to practice by Lynn Meltzer (ed.)
- Promoting executive function in the classroom (What works for special-needs learners series) by Lynn Meltzer
- Strategies for success: Classroom teaching techniques for students with learning differences (2nd ed.) by Lynn Meltzer, Bethany Roditi, Joan Steinberg, et al.
- Parent guide to hassle-free homework by Judith Stein, Lynn Meltzer, Kalyani Krishnan, Laura Pollica, Bethany Roditi
Kalyani Krishnan, M.A., is a school psychologist and the Assistant Director of Assessment at the Institute for Learning and Development in Lexington, MA. She is also a language and learning specialist. She conducts comprehensive evaluations of children, adolescents and adults with learning and attention difficulties. Kalyani earned a master’s degree in linguistics from Osmania University, Hyderabad India and a second master’s degree in learning disabilities from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. Kalyani has contributed to a number of recent books with her colleagues from ResearchILD including Executive Function in Education (Guilford Press, 2007), A Parent Guide to Hassle-Free Homework, (Scholastic, 2007), and Promoting Executive Function in the Classroom (Guilford Press, 2010).
Lynn Meltzer, Ph.D., is the President and Director of Research at the Research Institute for Learning and Development (ResearchILD) and Director of Assessment at the Institute for Learning and Development. She holds appointments at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Tufts University. She is also a fellow and past-president of the prestigious International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities. Her work includes numerous articles and books for professionals and parents with an emphasis on assessing and teaching executive function strategies.
This article is not available for reprinting in other publications or on other websites.
