In my last housekeeping blog I wrote about keeping order of school supplies in your home. Now is also a good time to start thinking about how you are going to keep order of the papers that will be coming home throughout the school year.
Let’s first establish one thing…you cannot possibly keep every single piece of paper that your child brings home. If you do, you will find paper piles cluttering your house. So if you can learn to let go of some things, it will help.
When my children were younger I basically had three options of what to do with a piece of paper brought home from school (whether it was a project, class work, report card, etc.).
My first option was to put it up on the refrigerator. Artwork used to grace my refrigerator doors. I would keep up just a couple of pieces for each of my three children. Then when something new came into the house, I would take the artwork that was on the fridge and put it into a binder. I will get back to the binder in a moment.
With artwork, I have also put really special pieces inside frames and they grace my walls. This means so much to my children to see their work displayed this way.
Now my second option with school papers was to throw it away. Some papers just really didn’t need to be kept. For instance, I don’t need to keep every single piece of math work that comes in.
My third option was to put it inside a binder. Each of my children got a new binder every year that was labeled with the grade they are in. It was filled with page protectors, where I kept only the most important papers. It might have been an “A” on an assignment, the first time they wrote their name, a report card, a note written from another classmate, and so forth. I also kept another binder that was filled with their artwork.
Not only did this keep school papers under control but it has also become a real keepsake for my children. They love to go back and look at what they did in past grades. It has become a memory keeper.
I also keep a binder for myself, labeled with their school name. This is where I keep important information sent home (such as their schedules, passwords to access grades, etc.).
The summer after each school year ends, I go through my binder and toss what I no longer need, making room for new information in the new school year.
How do you maintain the school papers that come in throughout the year?
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Photo by Mykl Roventine in Flickr