When Do You Prepare for the New School Year?

For supplies, I start as soon as they show up at the store.

For clothes, I buy as needed. Most of the stores have fall clothes by Aug, but here in Houston, it is still 90 degrees by the time school starts. If I buy fall clothes for my kid before the school year, he'll have outgrown them by the time it gets cold enough to actually wear them.

For actual lessons, I give my kid mini classes every day even in the summer. Since he's going into K we've been practicing writing letters, numbers, his name, reading, sight words, math, science, geography - even learning Spanish. I even make him to dot to dots still so he can keep his hand muscles strong.

Well, the lunchboxes and backpacks my kids used last year are still in great condition (love those LL Bean backpacks and lunch boxes!) and we pick up clothes here and there when the sales are good, so I won't really be doing any special "preparing" until it's time to sign up for the various volunteer thingies and filling out the forms and stuff the day before school starts. Our school recently switched from posting "supplies lists" (x number of Ticonderoga pencils, glue sticks, etc.) to having a "materials fee" so they could get bulk pricing and standardized supplies so l don't even need to stock up on those.

Oh, a day or two before or so.... :-)

I have a 4th grader and preparing for the new school year is really just a trip to Target for whatever supplies need to be refreshed. Clothes can be bought any time and they dress very casually at school, so her current summer clothes work until the weather starts changing. She'll need some new sneakers. Really, we keep this very low key. I don't really understand the "back-to-school" stress that I hear other moms talk about.

Well, we ordered & received the backpack, I'll pick up a new lunch kit and general school supplies in the next week or so, and I'll wait til last minute to buy some new shorts (he outgrew his summer ones already--BOTH batches), and I don't buy jeans or long pants until the weather changes which is about a month after school starts....and school "bedtime" will be instituted about 4-5 days before the first day. That's it, right? Am I forgetting something????

A week before. Not really much to do. Buy backpack if you do not have
one, get whatever supplies needed. Maybe new sneakers.

In my area, you have to start a little earlier. I bought most supplies 2 weekends ago just because they do run out. By the time they have any kind of "tax break"-if they do it this year-they will not have what we need. In September, the price of the supplies will be more than double. I paid 40 cents for crayons and they will be $2.99 later so I save. For their clothes, in my opinion this is really stupid, the stores do not have khakis and light blue polos later in the year so I end up searching and not finding what is needed. My girls especially are taller than average and my son is getting there so I have to shop earlier. Finding khaki colored pants at the end of Sept and end of October or later is almost impossible.

Well as I FT working mom I prepare when I find pockets of time available. I look at my calendar and try and determine when a good time for us would be. This year we did our back-to-school shopping 3 weeks before the start of the new school year. I actually took inventory of what she already had, a friend had given her a bunch of leggings, and so I went online to look at Targets website to see what tops would go with the leggings. I scored this year because when I got the chance to go and buy the tops they were actually all on clearance!!! And it saved me time by going online and scouting out what type of stuff they had. We bought clothes, supplies, and a backpack/lunch sack on that trip. I still need to buy snack/lunch type stuff but I'll do that closer to the start of the school year.

IMHO the back-to-school-shopping frenzy is a creature of the consumer driven media.

The only time it REALLY matters is if there is a tax holiday - then it's worth it. Or, if your child must have a certain uniform and the uniform store typically runs out (that has happened to me).

Otherwise it's a marketing gimmick most of the time.