School Timetable Maker

Typing forty cells into a browser to reproduce a timetable you are holding in your hand is worse than writing it out. So the grid is built to be printed empty: it keeps the times, the day headings and the break bands, and leaves every subject box open. Ten minutes with the school letter and a pen at the kitchen table gets you a timetable in your child's own handwriting, which they will read more readily than one in a typeface.

Type it in when the timetable is going to be reprinted. If you want it in three colours over the year, or you have two children on one wall and want them to match, or the timetable changes at half term, the typed version pays for itself the second time you print it. There is a copy-this-day-to-the-whole-week button for the schools whose week largely repeats.

The two are not exclusive. Everything typed stays typed when the blank switch is on, so you can print a blank one for the wall and a filled one for the folder from the same build.

This is the one structural thing the sheet insists on. Break and lunch run across all five days, so they are drawn as bands rather than as five separate cells saying the same word. It is a small thing that makes a grid readable at a glance: the eye uses the bands to find the morning and the afternoon without reading any of the times.

It also stops the most common mistake in a home-made timetable, which is giving lunch the same height as a maths lesson. A break band here is deliberately shallow and a lesson row takes the space that is left, so the shape of the sheet matches the shape of the day.

You can add as many bands as your school has. Assembly, registration, a wet-play slot and an after-school club are all just rows, and they can be moved up and down until the order is right.

By the front door rather than in a bedroom. The timetable is consulted at half past seven in the morning by somebody deciding what goes in a bag, and a chart in the room they have already left is a chart that gets ignored. The second-best place is inside a wardrobe door, where it is read while getting dressed.

The real problem a timetable solves is PE kit, which is why it is worth having on paper even in a family that has the school app. A child who can see that Tuesday says PE is a child who can be asked to check rather than told, and the number of forgotten kits drops in a way that no amount of reminding achieves.

Reprint it when the term changes rather than crossing things out. Swimming blocks, a new club, a teacher swapping the afternoon around - a timetable with three corrections on it stops being trusted, and rebuilding this one takes a minute.