I recently received an email from the mother of a student I taught a few years ago. Her son is away, so she decided to clean out her temporarily empty nest of the remnants of her son’s past life. She found his middle school backpack in a closet, and down at the bottom, amid the crumpled and squashed detritus, was a still-sealed thank you note from me, written in 2012.
Her email prompted me to think about what might lie at the bottom of my own child’s backpack. At the beginning of this school year, we instituted a weekly organizational routine, but progress has been slow. Last week, my son realized he was missing a critical spelling worksheet, so we took the opportunity to conduct a midweek spot check of his backpack and binders. While looking for that spelling worksheet, we found:
- A flowchart he designed for the classification of different types of smelly feet.
- His name written neatly 495 times on a single sheet of paper. (“I wanted to see how many times I could write my name on the bus ride home.”)
- Rules for a game he invented called Doodle Battle.
- A running log of what his friends hope will settle “The Quest for the Funniest Sentence on Earth.”
Alas, no spelling worksheet.
This child is my organizationally challenged son, and to be completely honest, he served as the inspiration for my posts about helping kids get the school year off to an organized start. He’s made some incredible progress this year. For example, his morning checklist (pictured) is the reason he no longer needs any adult guidance in order to wake up and make it out the door and on the bus by 7:21 every morning.
Despite these promising signs of success, important items — such as his spelling worksheet — still fall off his radar screen from time to time.
Kids are always works in progress, and my goal isn’t perfection. However, I like to believe that lost spelling sheets and thank you notes are preventable inconveniences.
So this week, I took our weekly backpack clean-out routine to the next level. My son returned home from school to the news that from here on out, every folder, every loose paper and all other various and sundry items in his backpack will be removed and sorted once a week, into three piles: file, return and toss. I gave him his own hanging file box with folders for each subject, for papers that he should probably keep around for a while. Papers deemed “return” go into a reusable folder, to be handed to his homeroom teacher every Friday. Everything else gets tossed into our wood stove paper box.
Today was our first backpack clean-out day, and it went well. A few papers got filed, a few got stashed in the folder for return, and plenty got tossed. And there, at the bottom of the pile, we found the infamous spelling worksheet. He smiled the smile of a happy, if chastened, fifth grader, and celebrated his victory by crafting a few more of the “Funniest Sentences on Earth.”