Daily Timetable Maker

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.

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.

Under about seven, use the Daily Routine Chart instead. A child who is still decoding words letter by letter cannot read a timetable at a glance, and adding a clock to a routine they are still learning gives them a second thing to fail at rather than a scaffold. Pictures and order first, times later.

From seven or eight, the clock is usually the whole problem and this is the sheet for it. Older children also tolerate a wall chart better when it looks like a timetable rather than a chart of pictures, which is a small thing and not a small thing: a nine-year-old who thinks a chart is babyish will not use it however good it is.

Both versions can live in the same house. It is common to have a picture chart on a five-year-old's door and a timetable on their sister's, and it is not a problem that they look different - it is the point. Print each one where the routine happens rather than putting a family chart on the fridge, which is never where the child is standing when they need it.