Organizing Your Kids' Paperwork
My kids got out of s
chool Friday. They came home with grades, certificates, pictures, and the leftover contents of their desks. It’s hard to deal with the onslaught of paperwork and mementos.
If you’re like me and you have about 3 punched, cropped, and embellished scrapbooks full of your first baby’s first year and half a “brag book” for baby #four (poor, sweet, unassuming baby #four), let me share a very good idea with you for dealing with kids’ paperwork from organizer, Maria Ricks.
At a certain point, much of what you have to save for your kids comes from school–papers, certificates, programs, etc. Maria Ricks’ solution is to get a thick binder (81/2 x 11) for each of your kids. Put 20 tabs in each binder. Write every age from 1-20 on the tabs. Get a stack of card stock and a bunch of plastic sheet protectors and store some in each of the binders. Then get a plastic zip pencil holder for the front of each binder and put some archival glue sticks, photo corners, and a Sharpie in each one. I keep the binders on a shelf right next to a three-hole punch.
As stuff comes in that you want to save–class pictures, homemade cards, certificates, etc.–you have everything at hand to punch or mount and stick in the binders behind the tabs for each age. It’s clean and organized and easy to browse through later. If you fill up a binder, you can continue in another one by moving the next age tabs into it. I wish I had started this a long time ago, but you can start now. Try it. You’ll like it.
Maria Ricks has a lot of good ideas for organizing your home and family. Try her site for more binder ideas, chore charts, and organization lists.
Read more from Kacy at Every Day I Write the Book.
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We unabashedly throw a lot of stuff away, as I am sure most parents do. When there is something particulalry nice, or meaningful we take a phot of it, so it get’s archived with our never ending stream of photos of our kids. And the really special art projects we keep. A few are actually on display around the house. This is a great tip though…
That is a fantastic tip! I get so overwhelmed with the other “tips” out there that include buying a scrapbook store and new closet system from the container store. I’m so going to use this, thanks!
The key ingredient is “doing” something with everything you think you want to store – I never seem to get around to the doing.
It’s a great idea though – for someone who “does” things!
I’m more like Josh however – now all these years later I really don’t have much stuff – and what little I have I gave to them when they left home – I think they tossed it!