STEP 1 – CLEANING UP LAST YEAR'S FLOOD

You all know what I’m talking about.  The endless flood of worksheets, book reports, permission slips, forms, and artwork that arrive in the backpack daily.  We all feel like we are drowning in it, especially in September.   I’ve got a simple system for you, but before you can implement it, you have to deal with LAST YEAR’s flood.  

99.99% of it is garbage.    

So if you didn’t do this in June, it’s time to get to it.  Gather up the piles of paper in your children’s backpacks, on your desk, your kitchen counter, the back of the minivan… wherever it got dumped the last week of school and have a seat.  Put the recycling bin right by your side and start sorting.   Toss most, and put aside any you aren’t sure about until you finish going through the all of it. Don’t try to decide about those them one at a time, just make a pile.  Hopefully you’ll be left with a pretty small stack of work.   

To help you decide whether it should be kept, ask yourself these two questions: 

1) Is this something I’d like to look at again and again?

2) Is this something my child will get a kick out of seeing in 20 years?  

If the answer is no, then there’s no need to save it, no matter how good it is.  If the answer is yes, you should save it – and I’ll get to how in a minute

Artwork is a special issue.  It comes in bigger shapes and sizes and dimensions. It often feels more special, more important.  The questions to ask yourself about the artwork are similar. 

1) Is this art worth displaying?  If so, then DO display it; don’t shove it in the closet.   Mount it, get a frame, put it on the wall and honor it.    

2) Will my child love seeing this in 20 years?   If not…you know what to do.  

3) Is it likely a very similar piece of art will come home again this coming year…?  

Again – unless you want you home to become an art storage facility in your children’s honor, you have to limit the work you keep.  

I’m a big fan of going digital with kids’ art.  Taking a picture of it and making your screen saver all kid art will allow you to enjoy it all the time without it taking up a lick of space in your basement.  To take it a step further, I’m a big fan of the app Artkive. It’s an app that allows you not only to take the picture with your phone, but identify which child did the work and at what age.  Then if you are so inclined you can upload the work and have a book printed out of all the work. Then, it's – a nice book on the shelf, not a box in the back of the closet.   Artkive even has a ‘concierge service’ – for a fee you can put it all in a box and have them do the work for you.  

What to do with the paperwork worth saving:

For each child, get yourself a nice lidded file box – plastic or metal, ideally not cardboard as this is a box meant to last.  Label 13 hanging folders, one for each year of school and put in the box.  Boom.  You are ready to save stuff until they graduate from high school.  Having this simple box, limited in size, will force you to really prioritize what is truly valuable in all that schoolwork.  And someday, when she’s grown, you can pass the box along to her to see how far she’s come.  My Pinterest Board has lots of samples of this, and the internet is full of free printables like this one you can use to label each folder.   

STEP 2:  Prepare For the Incoming Tsunami

What to do with the paperwork worth saving:

For each child, get yourself a nice lidded file box – plastic or metal, ideally not cardboard as this is a box meant to last.  Label 13 hanging folders, one for each year of school and put in the box.  Boom.  You are ready to save stuff until they graduate from high school.  Having this simple box, limited in size, will force you to really prioritize what is truly valuable in all that schoolwork.  And someday, when she’s grown, you can pass the box along to her to see how far she’s come.  My Pinterest Board has lots of samples of this, and the internet is full of free printables like this one you can use to label each folder.   

What to do when the new paper starts flowing in:

Two kinds of paper come home from school. Schoolwork and information.  Two kinds of paper, two different plans.  For schoolwork, I recommend being merciless.  Ditch whatever you can right away.  Then, have a magazine file like this with each child’s name on it.  Schoolwork that comes out of the backpack goes in here.  This protects you too for when a paper that looked unimportant is suddenly needed, and also frees you from the stress of deciding what to do with it.  When that magazine file gets full and messy in about a month, dig through it and toss most of it.   This may prevent you from having to do Step 1 above at all!   If art or paper comes home that is noteworthy – put it in a place of honor for a while – like the family command center board, or the of course, the refrigerator.  When it’s had its day, add it to the annual treasure file box. 

Papers requiring action from parents need a different plan.  You must have a single place for these papers.  I’ll go into more detail on this in next week’s post, but putting them into that important place should be part of your kids’ afterschool routine.  It may be a basket in your kitchen or a file box on your desk.  It may be the bulletin board of your family command center.   But it needs to be a thing you go through daily and deal with. 

With these systems set up BEFORE school starts.  You can avoid that painful rush of paper when it comes. 

Next Week:  Meal Planning and The Dreaded Backpack!