Parents: How to Organize School Papers

School is back in session now after the holiday break, and once again my house is littered with school papers!

My Kindergartener brings home an average of seven papers every day. My preschool-age daughter brings home about 10 papers a week. During the Christmas break, I was able to sort through the umpteen million piles of papers. But I found it impossible to keep up once they started bringing more home. And what do I do with the papers once I know which ones I want to keep?

I talked with a few parents, and I have come up with a relatively inexpensive system to help keep me from being buried under school papers.

Ream Boxes

Go to your local newspaper or copy shop and ask if they have the boxes that will hold approximately one ream of paper. These are excellent for storing about a week's worth of papers. They are usually white, so your child can help decorate them, plus they come with a lid. If those boxes are not available, then a box designed to hold 500 business envelopes will work too.

To prepare the boxes, write the child's name on the top of the lid and on at least two sides, so the name is visible when stacked. Let your kids decorate with crayon, marker, stickers, glitter, etc. Allow them to make those boxes their own.

Here's how we use them. Every evening we sit down at the kitchen table and look through all the papers. We do this as a family, which gives me the opportunity to comment and praise them for their efforts. Then I hand the kids their papers, and they put them in their own box.

At the end of the week, go through the papers and decide which ones to keep. If possible, involve the children in this process, especially if they are older. My three-year-old girl panics when something of hers gets tossed, so it's not practical to involve her in this step. Use your own judgement.

Have a three-hole punch handy, because that brings us to the next step in organization: preserving those special memories.

Three-ring Binders

Choose a large binder for each child, because you will want it to last as many years as possible. Use the dividers to indicate the grade. Then simply use a three-hole punch and insert the special papers into the binder.

One mother I spoke with has a big box for her child in which school papers are tossed. Her comment was 'I'll eventually go through them and pick out the ones to keep.' The word 'eventually' makes me nervous, because 'eventually' never happens for me!

This binder method allows me to sort through the papers on a weekly basis, making the task less overwhelming. Also, I prefer using a binder rather than a box because it's more organized and much easier to actually see what you've got, since flipping through pages is more convenient than digging through a box. Binders are also compact and easy to store.

Ideas for decorating the binder: Attach to the divider a small photo of your child each year and let your child write his name. It's fun for kids to look back at how their looks and penmanship changed. For the front cover, use a special piece of artwork they created that year. When switching it out, simply punch that page and insert it in the binder under the appropriate year.

Oversized or Odd-shaped Artwork

My daughter often comes home with paintings done on huge sheets of wax paper. It's not necessary or practical to keep the entire sheet. Don't be afraid to cut out an 8 ½ by 11 inch portion to put in the binder. Just be sure to write on the back any information you may have cut off, such as the title of the artwork, name and date.

For smaller works of art, there are a few options. If you have access to a copy shop, and the artwork is flat, then lamination may work for you. Be sure to instruct the person doing the lamination not to trim the excess to the size of the artwork, but rather to leave enough so it is an 8 ½ by 11 inch rectangle. Then punch and insert into the binder. By laminating, you are then able to preserve any information on the reverse side of the masterpiece.

Caution: Do not laminate anything that has crayon or wax on it. Most laminating machines use heat to seal the plastic, and it will melt your child's precious artwork.

If the art is not flat, you can put it in a large ziplock bag. Simply three-hole punch the empty bag and insert it into the binder to fill.

Another idea is to take a photo of your child with the artwork and placing that in the binder. Or if you have a color copier in your area, and the item is relatively flat and will fit on the glass of the copier, the artwork can be reduced to fit a letter-sized paper.

Tip: To figure how much to reduce the artwork, use this simple formulation: what you want divided by what you have. So if your masterpiece is 11 inches wide and you want it reduced to 8 inches wide, divide 8 by 11 to come up with a reduction rate of 73%.

Ta-Da! A Book Starring Your Child

Each binder should be able to hold several years of school work. Once the initial work of getting the binder set up is done, the rest of the school year will be a breeze. Involve your children in the process as much as possible. After all, the binders are filled with their work.

Now it's easy for your child to proudly show off her special accomplishments, and she'll have a keepsake to last a lifetime!