Curriculum Overview:
Organizing from the Inside Out for Teens

I. General Introduction

The following fourteen lesson plans are designed for use with middle and high school students. Teenagers are busier now than ever before. Facing unprecedented pressures to successfully navigate college applications, SATs, homework and extracurricular activities, students need to be organized and budget their time well in order to succeed.

The curriculum that follows is broken down into three sections: the first on ORGANIZING BASICS, the second on ORGANIZING YOUR SPACE, and the third on ORGANIZING YOUR TIME. Taught together or individually, these lessons will help your students better understand what's important to them, while equipping them with the life-skills needed to achieve their goals.

Organizing from the Inside Out for Teens, written by America's #1 professional organizer, Julie Morgenstern, and co-authored by her seventeen-year old daughter Jessi Morgenstern-Colon, is the only book on the market about "organization" and "time management" as it relates specifically to teens. Julie is the president of TASK MASTERS, a national organizing-consulting firm, and the author of The New York Times bestseller, Organizing from the Inside Out and Time Management from the Inside Out. Jessi, a busy New York City high school senior, knows about the challenges facing teens today.

Organizing is not a talent -- it's a life skill that everyone can learn. These lessons will help to improve your students' organizational and time management skills -- a skill set they will benefit from throughout their education and well into adulthood!

II. Concept definition: "Inside Out Organizing"

Organizing from the inside out taps into teen's individuality by helping him or her organize their time, space and belongings in a way that makes sense to them. The final result is an organizational system that makes a teenager feel good about himself, helps him accomplish all of his goals and is natural and easy to maintain. When approached from the inside out, organization and time management can be a form of self-expression for teens -– because how they organize their things and their time says a lot about who they are as individuals.

III. Using the ORGANIZING FROM THE INSIDE OUT FOR TEENS Curriculum

Every lesson in this curriculum is intended to take up no more than 15-20 minutes of class time. Each lesson follows a standard format (Key question, Goal, Class Format, Prompt and Activity) that leaves room for educators to custom-design the lesson to his/her student population. Every lesson is accompanied by a worksheet(s), which can be found in the Appendix.

Proceed to the mini lessons