Daily Timetable Maker
For a child who has outgrown pictures and needs a clock. As many sections as your day has, a time against every step, and a second column for the weekend so Saturday is not the day the chart is wrong. Print it blank to fill in by hand, or type the whole week.
The timetable
Leave it blank and the chart prints a line to write on.
Before school
6 of 8 steps
Tap one to add it, then write the time beside it.
After school
4 of 8 steps
Tap one to add it, then write the time beside it.
Evening
3 of 8 steps
Tap one to add it, then write the time beside it.
Bedtime
3 of 8 steps
Tap one to add it, then write the time beside it.
Another section
Clubs, quiet time, jobs, or a Saturday of its own.
Nothing here is sent anywhere unless you choose to send or save it - both are one-off and used for nothing else.
My Timetable
Name
Before school
- 7:00am8:30am☀️Wake up
- 7:15am9:00am👕Get dressed
- 7:30am9:15am🥣Breakfast
- 7:50am9:45am🪥Brush teeth
- 8:00am🎒Bag and shoes
- 8:15am🚪Out the door
After school
- 3:45pm🍎Snack
- 4:00pm10:00am✏️Homework
- 4:30pm10:30am📚Read for ten minutes
- 5:00pm11:00am⚽Play outside
Evening
- 5:45pm5:45pm🍽️Dinner
- 6:15pm6:15pm🧽Clear the table
- 6:30pm6:45pm🛁Bath or shower
Bedtime
- 6:50pm7:15pm🌙Pyjamas on
- 7:05pm7:30pm📖Story time
- 7:30pm8:00pm💤Lights out
A picture routine chart stops earning its place somewhere around the end of year two. The child can read, they know the order, and what they have started getting wrong is not the sequence but the clock: they are dressed, they are just dressed at ten past eight. This is the same chart with time on it. As many sections as your day actually has, a time against every step, and a separate column for the weekend, because a chart that says "wake up 7:00" is wrong on Saturday and a chart that is wrong on Saturday stops being believed on Tuesday.
Why the weekend gets its own column
Almost every printable timetable on the internet has one time column, which means it describes five days out of seven and the family writes the other two on in biro. That is the point at which the chart becomes a draft rather than a rule, and a draft does not settle an argument at half past seven in the morning.
Two columns also make the difference visible, which is worth something on its own. A child who can see that the weekend line says nine o'clock has been told, in advance and in writing, that the weekend is different. That is a much easier conversation than the one where a parent has to relitigate the whole thing every Saturday.
If your week does not split neatly into school and weekend, use the two columns for whatever it does split into. Term time and holidays, mum's house and dad's house, the days there is a childminder and the days there are not. The headings are fixed, but nothing stops you reading them as the two versions of your week that matter.
Setting the times so they can be kept
Work backwards from the door, not forwards from the alarm. Decide the time you have to be leaving, then subtract each step at the pace your child actually goes rather than the pace you wish they went. Almost every morning timetable that fails does so because every step was costed at its best-ever duration and the whole thing was ninety seconds of slack from end to end.
Put the times on the steps that are load-bearing and leave the rest without one. Wake up, breakfast, teeth, out of the door - four times is a timetable a child can hold. Fourteen times is a stopwatch, and the effect of a stopwatch on a nine-year-old is not the one you are looking for. Any step you leave blank prints a rule, so it is still there in the order without pretending to be timed.
Expect to reprint after a fortnight. The first version of a timetable is a hypothesis about how long things take and it is usually wrong by five or ten minutes in one place. Adjusting that one line and printing again is what turns the chart from something being imposed into something that describes the house, and it takes about a minute.
A chart shows the plan. This shows what they did
Maths, English, spelling, shapes, continents, space and Australia, as lessons to read and timed activities that are marked for you. One account covers the whole family, and you get a record of every run rather than a sheet on the fridge.