Command Centre: School Gear

Are mornings crazy at your house as everyone is rushing around trying to get everything they need for the day?  You know, things like lunches, homework, signed agendas, and money and permission forms for field trips.

To help make mornings less overwhelming, here are a few tips:

1. Set up a place where everything is kept together.  
2. Do as much as you can the night before.  
3. Put together a routine for each person in the family to follow before and after school so everyone knows what is expected of them.  

Have I always done these things?  Nope!  

We used to keep backpacks near the front door and lunch bags in the kitchen.  Other school stuff often landed on the kitchen table or on the floor by the front door or on the living room table.  Not a good system.

The entry area was small so we were frequently tripping over backpacks and it always looked messy.  The kitchen was also small and those lunch bags were always in the way on the counter.  We often forgot about things that ended up on that kitchen table pile. And who knows what stuff we missed because it ended up somewhere else in the house?!

After a lot of frustration, I set up a system that has worked for us for many years. My kids are older now but they still use a slightly modified version of this system. It just became a habit after awhile and it makes life so much easier.

School Gear Bins

Last week I showed you the first part of my command centre:  the wall files for all our daily paperwork.  Today I will tell you more about the bins we use for keeping the kids’ backpacks, lunch bags, and other school-related items together. The kids’ school gear is a big part of my command centre and everything is all in one spot.

You can just see the tops of their backpacks under the folders here.

Here’s a closer look at the bins that we keep all the kids’ school “stuff” in. {I miss the days when they had fun character backpacks – now they have plain black or grey ones.}

I got these clear bins at Canadian Tire and they are the perfect size for a backpack and lunch bag. They’re clear so they don’t make the space feel smaller. And they’re plastic which makes it easy to wipe them out from time to time.

I have them sitting on top of an old TV stand that my parents were purging from their house.  It’s the perfect size for our command centre and for holding these two bins.

Here’s what my kids did when they came home from school they were younger:

• They put their backpacks and lunch bags in their own bin. Then they unpacked everything right away.
• They put their agendas on the kitchen table for me to look at and sign, as well as any notices.  
• Their homework went on the table too.
• They unpacked their lunch bags, wiped them out, and then put them back in the bin with their backpacks.

While they were doing that, I was signing anything that needed to be signed, reading anything that needed to be read, and returning anything that needed to be returned, all while talking about their day.  Then I put everything I’d just dealt with back into their backpacks.

I did all of this right away so it wasn’t hanging over me all evening and I didn’t have to rush around doing any of it in the morning.  Mornings are crazy enough!

When they completed their homework, their books went back in their backpacks. Right away. Sense a theme here?  🙂 This way there was no panic in the morning trying to find “missing” homework or books.

In the morning, the kids just added their lunch bags to their already packed backpacks and grabbed them when they were ready to head out the door. Nice and easy!

These bins kept everything contained. It established a “home” for things so they didn’t travel to different places in the house. Or if they did (for example, when the kids got older and they did homework in their bedrooms) everything was returned to the bins.

Sometimes we kept other things in the bottom of the bins too:

• Gym bags they only needed a few days a week
• Parts of a project that was staying home for a few days
• School library books that had been read but weren’t due back yet
• Equipment or gear related to after-school or extra-curricular activities

Everything related to school and activities had a home in these bins.  And everyone in the family knew it.  So we never rarely {keeping it real!} had to look around for something. It’s simple. And it worked.

It still works, a decade later. This system makes before and after school easier.  

Your Turn

So now you’ve seen another section of my kitchen command centre.  Stay tuned for more on our routines, calendar, monthly goals page, weekly plans, and, my favourite part, our storage for the kids’ school work and art work that we keep!

In the meantime, if you’re looking for more ideas for a command centre, you can check out the command centres post I wrote as part of the 31 Days of Organizing Tips series or my Entryways, Drop Zones & Command Centres board on Pinterest.

How do you keep your mornings from becoming overwhelming?  Where do you store your kids’ school gear?  Please share your ideas in the comments so we all can learn from each other !

If you need help decluttering or organizing, contact me for in-person organizing services in the Mississauga area, or virtual organizing services anywhere else.

Happy organizing!