How to help your child use a planner at secondary school

What is a school planner?

Most secondary schools provide their pupils with a planner. This helps the pupils to be organised. It is like a diary but it goes from September until July.

The planner has different sections. The main part is the diary section.

This is where pupils record homework they have been set. They can also add reminders, for example to bring items such as baking ingredients or PE kit. They can write down any unusual events for example trips or visitors.

The planners also have sections which give the pupils handy summaries about things they may need to know in lessons. For example, this may include a periodic table and pH scale used in science.

Planners often contain a section about the rules and behaviour expected at school, as well as reminding the pupils about reward systems.

They will have a summary of the school day and holidays during the year. The pupils will be able to record their own timetable somewhere in the planner too.

How do I teach my child to use a school planner ?

It’s a good idea to introduce a planner as early as possible to get your child confident with it. You could start as early as Year 5.

Buy a ‘week to view’ diary to use with your child. If you can get an academic diary that’s even better.

Show your child how to use a diary. Explain that the top of the page shows you which month you’re looking at. Model how to find a date in the diary. For example if you are looking at May and you need March, which direction do you need to go? When you have the right month, can you then find the date you need? Give each other challenges to find different dates in the diary.

Then talk about different family member’s birthdays and put those in. Spend some time going through the diary and putting key dates in. Include those everyone celebrates such as Christmas, Eid, Pancake Day, Easter and so on.

You could put in any special events for your family such as a wedding or holiday. The more your child practises going through the diary to find dates, the quicker and more confident they will get. You can always have a list of the months written out so they can refer to it until they feel confident.

Your child can use the diary at home and at school to practise checking when things are happening and to practise putting their homework in. Talk to their teacher about using it in the classroom.

Find out from your child how they are set homework. Some schools will ask your child to write the homework in their planner. Other schools give homework online.

Help your child learn to write homework in their planners. You can do this at home first by giving them something to write on a specific date and see if they can find it. Once they understand this, they can try writing homework in it at school. They may need help from the teacher or assistant to do this. Even if the homework is online, encourage your child to write in their planner what lesson the homework is for and when it is due.

If your child finds it difficult to access the homework online, you could speak with the special educational needs coordinator (SENCO) or class teacher to ask that the homework is printed for them.

When your child comes home each night, look at the planner together and see if they have any homework they need to do. You can show them how to write a reminder on the due date too so they don’t forget to hand it in. You may need to help your child for a few weeks when they start secondary to make sure they remember to write homework and reminders down and that they look to check what they need to do each night.

If your child has any problems writing homework down when they start secondary school, be sure to contact the school and explain the problem so they can find a solution.

Things to consider

In order to use a planner, your child will need some basic skills first. These are:

• knowing the days of the week and months of the year in order
• understanding concepts such as before, after, the weekend and a fortnight
• knowing ordinal numbers (used in dates such as 1^st, 2^nd 29^th and so on)

Your speech and language therapist may have already recommended these as targets for your child, but if not and your child isn’t sure about them, please ask for some extra support for teaching these.