Project Primer

It seems that nowadays school-age kids have more of everything in their lives to occupy their time. Whether its sports, after-school educational activities and clubs, dance classes, community involvement, or a myriad of other possibilities todays students have a greater need to stay organized than perhaps ever in the past. A key factor in helping students make the most of their valuable time is to use intelligent approaches to organizing school assignments.

Here are a few suggestions:

Divide ring binders into subject-specific sections.
3-ring binders have been around forever, but many students do not utilize them most effectively. Typically, a student will just place 3-hole punched papers into the binder in any random order. The best way to use a binder is to complement it with a subject tab divider which allows for fast, fingertip referencing. Many subject tab dividers can be customized through your computer printer and several styles are available with or without a class schedule and/or a table of contents. Complete your students binder by also adding clear sheet protectors that can be used to protect extra-important assignments and scholastic documents such as book reports and certificates.

Have your student carry a daily planner.
Much like adults utilize a planner to schedule their appointments, a student can use a daily planner to organize and track the progress of their school assignments. For example, lets say the student is working on a 5-week project and certain aspects of the project are due each day. Write these down in the planner, providing a quick-reference way to help stay on schedule.

Use tickler files.
Term papers, as their name suggests, are usually worked on over a long-term period of several months. Establish a separate file, at the beginning of the project, to be used as a ticker file where you can place research information as its gathered. For instance, a student may be working on a term paper about outer space. As the project proceeds and the student gathers background about each planet, the stars, the sun and other topics relating to the term paper, this information can be placed immediately into the tickler file providing an all-in-one spot to access the research later on when its time to write the paper.