Our family calendar is hard to manage. That is why for years I did it all by myself. I started realizing last year though, that my then 8th grader had no clue what was happening and was overly relying on me to orally give him his plans. This probably contributed to his sense of thinking that time was endless and open and free. When I look at our calendar all I see is clutter, filled space and even some overlapping entries! How could I get my son to see time as I saw it?
This is the year that I started holding my kids accountable for helping manage their schedule. The impetus was the fact that my ninth grade homeschooled son joined a school based robotics team. The team is the most organized group that I've ever seen, and the most technically savvy. The coach/teacher keeps a calendar on the team's website that shows all the various meeting times and special meetings for special teams. Rather than inundate us with a zillion emails with changes he updates the calendar. This is great because changes occur often. My son has the login that the teacher set up, so I make him check the calendar.
The robotics team thing was what got us started. I decided to expand it, and have each of my kids keep a Google Calendar (it is free online). I started my own calendar too. I realized that if I create a calendar with an entry I can send an invite to my kids so the entry automatically goes on theirs. This helps streamline the process and gets us on the same page. So our starting point from the formerly clean slate calendar is bedtime and sleep time, waking time, eating meals, and times we are home doing homeschool lessons with me facilitating.
From there each of my kids has their own entries they put in.
We color code the activities. Homeschooling at home is orange. Boy Scouts is green. Sleeping and eating is purple. With a quick glance you can see how we spend our time. (I let them pick their own colors. I haven't decided if it makes sense that we use all the same key code colors or if my original idea to be aligned was some overly controlling notion of mine, so I told my kids to pick their own colors.)
My hope was that this would help my kids see their lives spread out in a visual manner. If they saw that time was finite maybe they'd get better about time management. Well, one can only wish...
The Google calendar is so easy to use and easy to update that it works well compared to my past attempts to have my kids use paper based calendars. Past attempts to use paper calendars have failed.
The calendar can be set to email you reminders. When my eleven year old was setting up his calendar he thought that was cool so he set alarms for everything.
The next week he exclaimed, "Oh! Google calendar emailed me a reminder it's lunch time." I responded, "Change the setting to shut that off." He replied, "No! I hardly get any emails I like getting it."
A few days later he complained that his email inbox was completely full of a bunch of garbage notifications. I had to laugh. I then reminded him how to alter his own settings and told him to have at it.
So far, so good with the Google calendar.
Tips for Using Google Calendar
Start with the basics: waking up, eating, sleeping.
Use the repeat button to repeat in many different combinations such as 2nd Tuesday or M-W-F or Monday through Friday.
Pick a color for activities to see how you really spend your time.
Set the end time to expire at the end of the year or some long date in the future for ongoing activities. You can always edit the end date if one ever arrives!
Send email invites to your family members who use Google calendar so they don't have to make up the same exact entry by themselves. I was going to say it helps your kids not make mistakes about the times of the appointments until I remembered my kids found a couple of time mistakes and some spelling typos that I made.