Declare Independence from your Clutter
How To Organize Kid’s School Papers and Artwork
By Brett Friel 2nd Grade
Keeping up with all the papers children bring home from school can be a full time job. Having a good system to manage homework, artwork and school correspondence is crucial to keeping your child (and yourself) organized during the busy school year. I keep a file for each of my children with a label for the grade that they are in. Important papers that come home from school go into this folder. At the end of the year, we go through the folder together to determine what papers should be kept and what can go. It’s a fun project to do together in the summer reflecting on the past year. I keep a box that the folder goes into, this way, the keepsakes are organized chronologically through the years.
Artwork is the trickiest of all papers to organize because it doesn’t usually fit into a file folder or box. Sometimes artwork can be forced to fit by trimming it, but a better way (if you’re wiling to part with the tactile original artwork), is to take a digital photo. With a digital image, there are many ways you can store the artwork and you can even create beautiful keepsake books as a memory. One company that makes a beautiful artwork keepsake book is The Little Author, you send them the artwork and they take high quality images of each piece of art and compile it into a beautiful book. You can also take your own images and create a digital book from Shutterfly or one the many services out there that compile beautiful digital books. Keeping artwork on display (within reason) helps your child to know their work is appreciated, but keeping too much can cause clutter and chaos. Reevaluate from time to time which artwork to keep displayed, and remember, if you keep too much you can’t find what’s really important!
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I love that you included Brett’s awesome Mona Lisa! (And the tips are great too!)