Every school year starts with a new backpack. As a teacher, I have seen many parents take the role as the expert of their child’s backpack. They pack the backpack at home, unpack it at school, pack it back up at the end of the day, and unpack it at home.

A carton of milk’s advice is to let your child be the expert of his/her own backpack. Even if they are responsible for 1 thing in their backpack, they will take more ownership and responsibility for their belongings. Building this small routine into your morning and evening will help make your day run much more smoothly (especially if you have more than 1 school age child, which means more than 1 back pack to manage)

Depending on your child’s strengths, you can give your child certain ‘backpack responsibilities’. Then, you can make a sign to remind them of what they need to do. You should show it to them and walk them through what each picture means. All you need is paper and pencils (or images from the computer).

Your child can be responsible for one item, and you can make something that looks like this:

 

 

 

 

 

Or you can make your child a whole backpack checklist like this:

 

 

 

 

 

Either way, help your child become the expert on his/her own backpack! Let us know if you try this. We would love to hear stories about how it helps your household routines.

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1. Independence in a time crunch
2. Coming up in September
3. Picture cues help independence
4. Book of the week: Things that Go
5. Teach and encourage independence