School Papers - Simple Steps to Decrease the Paper Clutter

Papers from school can be harder to deal with than if someone came in and dumped a garage truck full of trash in your driveway. Why? Because they are personal! Your children did them, worked on them and created them. That is why so many mom's have trouble getting rid of them. They just love to see what their child has accomplished.
So can you keep everything all your kids do from the time the start school until they finish? Sure...if you want to live in a trash zone or store them in a storage unit so they can rot in there.
No..of course you can't, and better yet, there is no reason you should.

Should you keep a few special papers each year so that you can enjoy them and they can see them when they grow up? Certainly! But only a few.

Here is a guideline to help you decide what papers to keep and what to get rid of.

ONE PAPER PER MONTH PER CHILD.

How is that for simple? It gives you a limit, a guideline and a goal. Can you keep less than that....YES!!

But what if they have 1 really good picture that won a school coloring contest and then an A+ on their first big report, but they are in the same month? Ok...no problem, go back through the other months and decide on which one is not as important to keep as these.
So really it is 12 papers a year. Yes...you can use the summer months as a cushion.

Don't keep all the worksheets that they do. They are worksheets..just to learn.
Look for the stories they wrote by themselves.
Look for the pictures they did not trace, but drew themselves.
Look for the reports they worked months on and were so proud of.

So what do you do with all the other pictures they drew, science fair projects with huge poster boards?

Take a picture!! Just like the above pictures. My triplets were thrilled to pose with their projects and loved that I liked them enough to take pictures of them. They don't care if they don't have that big poster shoved back in some cubby space in the basement anymore. They still have the memories..and that is all we need too.
You can scan them into your computer if small enough and you have the memory space on your computer.

You can create a photo book from some of these online places like Snapfish. Peter Walsh shared this idea on one of his Oprah shows. He said take pictures of their art work (you can put more than one of their pictures in the photo) and then at the end of each school year create one of these photobooks with their art work. There is room to write in the book accomplishments, teacher's names, accomplishments for the year. This would be much nicer for them to have when they are older than a box full of papers.

You can have a bulletin board that you keep a special paper of the day or of the week on to showcase it if its a little special and they worked hard on it that week. This will make them feel proud. Then when you take it down, if its not that most special paper of the month...throw it away. (They do not need to see you physically throw it away, nor do you have to tell them - they will just be thrilled their new picture is up now.)

If you keep everything....then nothing will seem special!!

Keeping big boxes of papers to give your children is a burden not a gift. They have to deal with getting rid of all the papers you felt to guilty getting rid of.
Being handed one box of things that goes from k-12 is not so bad, and photo books would be even better.


Remember, it is not like you are saying your child isn't special or you don't like the work they do by throwing it away. But keeping everything is not feasible if you want to have a home that is comfortable and not cluttered.

Papers...Papers....Papers!!

I did my momtv.com web cast last night on Paper Clutter. I am going to rerun the post that I did several months back, below.
Kristy asked in the comments about the family bringing in all the papers and how to handle that.
Have a "drop zone" for your mail. A basket or bin, some place that everyone in the family knows to put the mail. It may be children's papers (see this Thursday's post for Children's papers)from school too. Any papers coming into the house by anyone needs to go in this designated spot. Then you need to go through all these papers using the system below.
I mentioned last night in my web cast last night that Barbara Hemphill who wrote Taming The Paper Tiger has a basically the same system, but has made it very easy to remember the categories.
She says that every paper coming into the house goes into one of these categories.
F - File
A - Action
T - Trash
This is a real easy way to remember it. It gets broken down a little more than this and I go into it, but this helps you to realize that every paper has a place.



All of us have sooooo many papers coming into our homes everyday. We have bills, magazines, coupons, advertisements, newspapers, and many more. It can get completely over whelming!!! So what do you do with all of them? What do you keep? What do you throw away???
You would think that with the Internet and e-mail that our influx of paper would be greatly reduced, but it has decreased by very little.
Figuring out a way to manage the paper is the key. We have to control the paper and not let the paper control us!! I know that sound so silly, but it can be true.
You need to work out a sorting system for any paper that comes through your door. If you know what to do with it when it comes in..then it hopefully won't pile up.
Ok...its actually very basic.

You can do it all in 4 sorting bins.
1) Bills
2) Action
3) File
4) Pitch

The Bill bin could very well be in the Action bin, it is an action. But I like to keep them separated so that bills don't get lost in a pile of things that may not be as important or dated. It can be easy to get behind in your bill paying, and that can cause problems with your credit..not to mention your nerves.

The Action bin is anything that needs attention. Filling out a permission slip for your childs field trip, a form to order that book that you need for a class, a form that needs to be filled out for insurance, etc.

The File bin is any paper that you need to keep (notice I said "need") and will be filed in a hanging file of a file cabinet.

The Pitch bin should end up being your biggest pile. You do need to pay attention to what goes into the trash can. Having a shredder is important. You want to make sure that you shred anything that has any financial information on it, personal information on it or as some suggest even your name or address. With this age of someone being able to steal your identity, it's important to be careful.

So when you bring in your mail...take a minute and stand in front of your 4 bins (stackable plastic paper trays work great...and if you have the space, you don't need to stack them) and sort through it. Take each piece and quickly decide if its an ad and you don't plan to ever use it...pitch it! If its a bill thats easy. You don't have to take the time to open your bills at this point, unless you are unsure if it is or not. Take those zillions of credit card offers and put them in the pitch bin! Don't spend too much time on it. Any ads will come back again and you can always find information on the Internet.

If you take a few minutes each day to go through your papers and sort them then you soon can have a table that looks like this