Create An Easy School Morning Routine

Our Crazy School Mornings

How it started! 5 weeks into the school term and you could describe our morning routine for school as insanity! Most days the kids and I were arriving as the school bell went OR LATER!

Plus, the rush and the stress in the mornings was leaving me feeling flat and behind in what else I needed to get done for the day. Whatever we were doing wasn’t working. Something had to change!

Here’s how to create a successful morning routine for school that works for your family. It will change your mornings too!

How To Create A Successful Morning Routine For School

1. Write Down Everything That Needs Doing Before School

The tasks on your list may be essential like get dressed or eat breakfast as well as things you would like to do in the mornings.

Your school morning routine list will vary on your family and individual personalities, and what kind of morning you like.

My kids and I (11 yrs old, 9 yrs old and 7 yrs old), prefer to get up earlier and have time to read, play games rather than use less time and be rushing to get ready. So when I wrote my list of tasks I also included reading my bible and journaling.

Update: Life with almost 3 teenagers and a baby, my morning list now is very short. Have breakfast, get dressed, put a load on washing on, dress and feed the baby. I am not going off to work at the moment so I have time to come home and do more jobs. I still don’t like to rush in the mornings though!

Action Task:

Think about what you want your mornings to be like. Then write down what you want to get done.

What do you want to have time for?
What tasks are essential?
What tasks could be done at a different time or skipped altogether?

Check out How Often Should You Clean Your House and The Simply Clean Book for ideas about daily and weekly tasks!

Want to give your kids a list of daily chores or responsibilities? Check out these printable family chore charts.

2. Problem Solve Your List Of Tasks

Often people are late for something because they are trying to fit too many things into the amount of time they have. It becomes impossible to get everything done in the time allocated, as well as causing everyone a lot of stress and anxiety in the process.

Other times tardiness is caused by specific issues with the tasks themselves.

It is helpful to ask yourself:

What’s really causing us to be late? Or who is?
What’s actually the problem here?
How can it be solved?

Problem Solving Our Morning Routine For School

One of our main issues was breakfast. I had getting the kids to make their own breakfast. The problem was the process of just deciding what they wanted to eat each morning was taking at least 15 minutes. That didn’t include the time taken to then make breakfast and to clean up the extra mess.

The way we were doing breakfast wasn’t helping us leave the house when we needed to. Not to mention a couple of times, the kids ended up eating in the car or going without breakfast altogether.

The solution; I decided that we would eat breakfast together in the mornings. Most days I will be responsible for preparing what’s for breakfast. After discussing it with the kids, we decided on pancakes, porridge, parathas and egg, and cereal for our breakfasts.

Another decision we made was that each person was to be responsible for cleaning up after themselves. This means putting their plate and cutlery into the sink to be washed later. That would save me time cleaning up from breakfast.

Action Task:

Have a look through your list of tasks and notice what things cause issues for your kids in the morning. Decide how you want to resolve that in creating your school morning routine list.

3. Allocate A Time Frame

To work out how much time you (and the rest of the family) will need for your school morning routine, allocate a time amount to each task on your list. I got pretty detailed with my list.

Take Into Consideration:

Often we under estimate the time something takes to do so be generous in your estimation.
Life never goes as planned, especially with kids.

So the key to being successful with your morning routine for school days, is to include MARGIN TIME!!

Margin time is planning for the unexpected by adding at least an extra 20 to 30 minutes or more.

Like This Morning…

One of our school mornings this week involved two kids fighting with each other. Plus, one kid having a meltdown over how much honey was in their porridge. Then the same kid refusing to eat breakfast until something was done about it.

I didn’t have time planned for those things! However because I had allocated a margin time, we were still able to get to school before school day started.

The more meltdowns or lack of cooperativeness you expect with your kids in the mornings, the more margin time you will need to add in.

Do You Want To Increase Cooperativeness?

Then go back to Step 2 and see if there anything you could change or do differently to make the mornings go more smoothly.

Also Remember…

Allow time for getting your kids into the car and on the way to school. Of if walking to school, getting out the door and started down the footpath.

Silly me, I think it should take us 2 to 3 minutes to go from the house to the car. The whole process takes us more like 10 minutes.

So I need to allow more time for that or change what we are doing.

Action Task:

Write down an amount of time next to each task on your list.
Include a margin time.
Then add up all your amounts.
Take that total amount of time away from the time that you plan to leave and set the alarm to wake up then.

Congratulations you are on your way to having a successful morning routine for school!