How to Keep Your Children's Paperwork Organized

It’s almost summer time. In no time your kids will be celebrating their last day of the school year and getting ready for all of the fun that comes with warm weather. They will come back to the house imagining the full days of bike rides and water fights you, however, will see the thing you’ve been dreading. Overflowing book bags! Their backpacks are filled with school papers and half used school supplies. Leaving your children’s bags where they were dropped can be tempting. Perhaps they will just disappear and save you the trouble of organizing home paperwork! We won’t likely get that lucky any time soon, so it’s time to get started organizing your children’s papers.

Choosing what to keep and what you will get rid of can be hard. You can find a special moment or memory in almost every project they’ve finished or math assignment they have fought through, but unless you have plans rent out a storage unit (I DO NOT recommend this), you can’t keep everything while organizing home paperwork. Begin by making a quick look through. Use a basket to put the things you may want to keep in. When you start to empty out the backpacks there will be things that are easy to toss or recycle. Old pens, stubs of pencils, shreds of paper or crumpled old homework. You can get a start this way!

Don’t go it alone! Take this opportunity to teach your children to be organized people. Stop your kids from growing up to be pack rats, get them involved in the sorting process. Now that you have a basket of things that you might keep you’ll have to sort through it. Have your older children decide what stays. This can seem scary when you first start. They may want to keep everything in the basket, or even worse for you save nothing! Guide children who have a hard time letting anything go. Put limits on their memorabilia, allow each child one large plastic tote. Kids learn quickly, the more they practice the better they will become at parting with things and also at organizing home paperwork. If you’re not sure if you can part with something, take pictures of your kids with the projects. You have something physical to remember the project by without keeping the big poster board. It may be surprising to you what your child wants to keep and what they are completely prepared to part with. You may find their choices are different than yours.

Think about it. What are you saving your children’s school projects and papers for? It is probably in your plans to pass on these beloved things to your child after they’ve grown. Your children will be adults when you’re ready to hand over the boxes, they may have homes and children of their own. They will be the parent you are now staring at boxes full of their children’s treasures convinced they couldn’t part with a single piece of it. So what would happen if your parent showed up on your doorstop this afternoon with your childhood memorabilia? How many boxes would you want to look through, how much time and space would you give to long saved boxes? Create memory books of pictures of project, it is a great way to keep the memories and save you, and your grown children, storage space.

Making some of your toss and keep decisions during the school year will make the end of the year much easier on everyone. If there is less to go through it won’t feel like such an impossible task. Put kids’ projects in a place of prominence to display them proudly for a week or so, then decide if the project fate. Your child can choose to recycle it (give them the option of taking a memory picture) or keep the project in their tote. The more practice your kids have at making these decisions faster and easier the end of the school year sort will become.

Organizing home paperwork doesn’t have to be an agonizing chore. It can be an enjoyable time to hear stories about your child’s school time and learn about the memories that are most important to them!