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The start of a new school year arrives with a lot of paper — letters from school, new timetables, updated contact details, and a dozen things that need to be somewhere visible. Printing a handful of key items before term starts properly can take the pressure off considerably. This isn't about printing everything. It's about printing the right things so the first few weeks run more smoothly.
Weekly Timetables and Class Schedules
A printed timetable pinned in the kitchen or hallway gives the whole household a shared view of the week. Children can check what they need for the next day without asking, and parents can spot clashes or busy days at a glance without opening an app or scrolling through emails.
Print one copy per child and laminate it if you want it to last the term. For younger children especially, seeing the week laid out visually helps them understand their routine and feel less uncertain about what's coming. Update it if anything changes mid-term and reprint — it takes two minutes and prevents a week of confusion.
Homework Trackers and Assignment Lists
Homework often comes from multiple teachers, multiple platforms, and multiple directions. A simple printed tracker — subject, task, due date, done — gives children one place to record everything and one thing to check before they start an evening's work.
This is particularly effective for primary-age children who are building study habits, and for secondary students juggling several subjects at once. Crossing a task off a list by hand creates a small but genuine sense of progress that ticking a digital checkbox rarely matches. Print a fresh sheet each week and keep it on the desk or homework area.
School Contact and Key Information Sheets
Schools send a lot of information at the start of term — office numbers, email addresses, absence reporting procedures, key staff contacts, and policy documents. Most of it arrives digitally, gets read once, and then becomes very difficult to find again when you actually need it.
Printing a one-page summary of the most important information and keeping it somewhere accessible — on the fridge, in a kitchen drawer, inside a folder — means you can find it immediately when you need the absence line number at 7am or the trip permission deadline at 9pm. Worth five minutes of setup at the start of each year.
Term Calendars and Event Lists
A printed term calendar lets you map inset days, school holidays, trips, sports days, parents' evenings, and other events onto a single sheet that the whole household can see. Unlike a shared digital calendar, it requires no login, no screen, and no battery — anyone can check it or add something with a pen.
Print at A4 or A3 with generous daily boxes for writing in. Canon's free template library includes calendar designs you can download, personalise, and print straight from home — see our Canon Creative Park page for details on accessing them. Mark term dates first, then add events as they come in during the first week.
Lunch Planners
Back to school usually means back to packed lunches. A printed weekly lunch planner stuck to the fridge eliminates the daily "what do you want in your lunch?" conversation and makes the weekly food shop more efficient — you know exactly what you need rather than guessing.
Planning five lunches in advance takes ten minutes on a Sunday and saves considerably more time across the week. It also reduces waste, since ingredients are bought with a specific purpose rather than optimistically. HP's free printables collection includes meal and lunch planner templates — see our HP Printables page to access them.
Labels for Uniforms and Equipment
Lost items are close to inevitable during the school year. A PE kit left in the changing rooms, a lunchbox left on a table, a coat left on a peg — these things happen. Printed labels on everything significantly increase the chances of items finding their way back.
Print labels on adhesive label sheets for fabric items and lunch boxes. Clear, legible labels with the child's name and class are all you need — the simpler the better. Do this before the first week rather than after the first item goes missing. Labels for stationery, folders, and bags are worth doing at the same time.
Reading Logs and Progress Trackers
Many schools ask children to record their reading at home. A printed reading log — title, author, date started, date finished, a line or two of thoughts — gives children a record they can be proud of and makes the habit feel more tangible than an entry in an app.
Older children can use a similar format for tracking progress through a reading list or recording books they want to read next. Keep it simple: one sheet per term is usually enough. Some children respond well to seeing a term's worth of books listed on one page — it makes the effort feel visible.
Getting the Best Results
School printing is mostly text and simple layouts, so standard plain paper works fine for timetables, trackers, and planners. Where you want something more durable — a laminated timetable, a term calendar that will last the full term on the wall — a slightly heavier paper stock makes a difference to how well it holds up.
Print quality matters even for functional documents. Faded text on a homework tracker or smudged labels are harder to read and write on. Genuine ink cartridges from HP, Canon, Epson, and Brother keep output consistent and avoid the fading that compatible inks can produce as they run low.
And when cartridges are done, don't bin them — every HP and Canon order from Crazy Kangaroo includes a free prepaid recycling envelope, or you can download a free Freepost recycling label at any time.
