Way back when my boys were in preschool, I realized that I had a hard time letting go of ANY of their school work. Each scribble was precious and I kept every scrap of paper. At the end of the school year I had a tub full of it. It occurred to me that unless we were willing to rent a storage unit just for the sole purpose of keeping my boys’ school memories–I needed to come up with a system. I have used this system for 7 years now and it seems to work pretty well whether you save everything like me or just a few choice things like I probably should
1.I buy a bunch of these folders when they go on sale for a penny during back-to-school supply sales.
2. At the beginning of each month, I select one for each child and write their name, grade, the month and year. All throughout the month each school day, when the papers come home, I look at them and then place them in their folders. The artwork usually gets displayed on our refrigerator.
As you can see–I’ve been at this long enough to be able to recycle the folders–just scratch out the old and write the new. If you want to be really “gold star” use labels so they look neater–neatness is not my superpower.
3. At the end of the month I take the (now very full) folders and place them in a file cabinet that has hanging files for each month. I also clean off the refrigerator and put those in the folders too–otherwise my entire refrigerator, oven, dishwasher and probably my entire house would be wallpapered with their art.
I won’t lie–it gets a little crammed by the end of the school year, but I only am working with one file drawer. Use a couple drawers if you are fortunate enough to have the space (you lucky, lucky girl)
4. At the end of the school year, I go through it all and only save what is most important and memorable to me. I can usually cram it all in one folder per child and then I move those files to a storage box like this one:
This represents 7 years worth of school papers. I’m probably going to either need to re-purge or buy another of these. Either way it’s better than a house (or storage room) full of tubs of paper.
Getting this done is definitely helping me feel a little more optimistic about space in our home. Up next will be purging a few of my “collections”. Lord, help me when it comes parting with the random things I collect.