A few years ago, a friend and I started an organizing business we named 2NeatChicks. She has since moved to Oklahoma and I went from no kids to two kids. Needless to say, the organizing gig has been temporarily sidelined. While I haven’t had the time to set up a Facebook page for our business much less maintain it with regular organizing tips, my need to keep an organized home is still ever present. If anything, organizing is more necessary than ever. While writing an organization themed blog may not be a regular occurrence for me right now, I would still like to share some ideas for organizing your kids’ schoolwork. Whether this is a project you want to do now that the school year is over or take care of it at the end of the summer in preparation for the start of a new school year, hopefully you’ll leave this blog with a plan that helps you feel less overwhelmed.
Gabriel’s last day of preschool was this past Thursday. His teachers sent home a wonderful gift – a scrapbook. He wasn’t coming home with papers most days during the school year so the three ring binder chronicled the entire year with pictures he had painted or colored and photos of he and his classmates (as Gabriel says, “my school friends”). The back is a very sweet reminder of his year in the Merry Monkey’s two year old class.
However it isn’t realistic to assume every class my boys attend will handle their extraordinary artwork this way. So how do you reign in and master the mess before the avalanche of papers has you buying ANOTHER storage tub before they even begin kindergarten?
First let me offer you an “Aha!” moment. Imagine your mother comes to your house and begins unloading every box and tub of artwork, writing, school project, etc that you did over the period of about 18 years. Are you going to take the time to go through all of your old papers? That is probably laughable to most mothers – extra time? Ha! What is THAT? Visualize the amount of papers you have already saved for your child(ren) and multiply it through their senior year. Overwhelming, yes. Fire hazard, probably. Just remember you are not doing your children any favors by keeping everything.
Secondly, consider the large amount of paperwork you are keeping for your little prodigy. Does that huge pile motivate you to take on a scrapbooking project? Or does it overwhelm you? By keeping the items to a manageable amount you are more likely to complete that memory book for your child. And they are in turn more likely to look through a book with samples of their work than they are to dig through a box that may have become home to a mouse sometime in the last decade.
Here are some solutions you may consider using to protect your space and your sanity:
- Storage ideas:
- 14x14x3 plastic storage boxes - limit one per child per year.
- Art folders - the example in the link below is a 10-pocket portfolio. Use one pocket per year.
- Consider asking your older children for input on what items are significant to them.
- Take a picture of the project and toss the showboard. Or take a picture with the child holding the project and use that in the memory book.
- Put the child's initials and the date on the back of the picture. Pregnancy brain seems to almost always be replaced by Mommy brain. I can't guarantee I'll remember if a Thanksgiving turkey hand print was Gabriel's or David's in ten years.
- Keep the most unique, special and distinctive items. If the paper doesn't show any skill (for example, they glued things to a page or it is one of many finger paintings that year) then toss it. Store items showing an improvement in their coloring or drawing, their letters and writing, etc. Also, don't feel that you need to save every paper that has your child's precious hand print. If your choice of storage becomes full before the school year is over, then you need to rethink some items.
- If not on the fridge, a display board is great for showcasing anything your child is excited about whether or not you end up keeping it as a memento later. As new items enter your home and the display space is full, then take other pictures down and determine if they should stored or tossed.
There is a common denominator for every organization project I have done for friends and clients. So my motto is something like this: “Organization is not about accommodation. Organization is about elimination”. In practice, organization doesn’t mean hitting up your local Container Store to buy storage for all the things you have, it’s first about reducing the “stuff” that is filling up your space.
Caryn Bell
2NeatChicks.com
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