Key stage 1 children often lose clothes or put the wrong ones on. Poorly organised changing for PE is a common cause. You need a firm step-by-step routine. This one has been handed down from teacher to teacher. Children like it, and it works.

Before PE, the children:

* Fetch their PE bags, come back to their places, and sit on their chairs with PE bags on the table before them.

* Take off their shoes.

* Empty their PE bags on the table and put the empty bags on top of the PE kit.

* Undress, except for pants and vests, and put all their clothes into their PEbag. Shoes go in last. Check they close the bag’s drawstrings.

* Put on their PE kit.

After PE, they:

* Sit on their chairs and empty their clothes from their PE bags on to the table - again the PE bag goes on top of the clothes.

* Take off their kit, put it in the bags, put the bags under their chairs.

* Get dressed.

Encourage competent children to help the others and offer advice (“You haven’t done those buttons up”). Ask parents not to send children in trousers so tight that they cannot undo the zips and buttons.

Next week: Keeping exercise books neat