The joy of paper clutter

Anyone out there feeling the sarcasm included with the post title? Just checking.

Unfortunately, paper clutter is a thing. A constant thing, as far as I can tell. And I wanted to post about two specific areas that I've given a lot of though to, when it comes to clutter of the paper variety.

Let's start with children's school papers. I don't know about you, but there are a lot of papers that come home every single day with our kids. And very early on, I had to figure out a system that would work and that would not make me want to pull my hair out with every stack of paper I was handed from a child walking in the door from a day at school.

And this what I came up with...

To keep important schoolwork, projects, artwork, worksheets and tests, each of our kids have a single, portable file box. Inside each box, there are thirteen hanging file folders, with a tab on each one. They are labeled with each child's name and each grade (from Kindergarten to 12th grade). Every school year, as papers and projects come home from school, I have a place in our office that I keep the ones that mean the most to our kids or that represent something fun or special that happened during that grade. They all go into the stack for the current school year and there they stay, until the school year has ended.

(Side note: Some of my kids keep all of the work that is handed back to them, until their grades come out for the term. Especially in junior high and high school, it isn't wise of them to get rid of anything, just in case a teacher forgets to record that they did it. So my older kids usually keep everything in their individual folders and binders until the term is over and their grades are posted. Once that happens, we quickly go through their papers/projects from that term and keep a few they did extra well on or want to remember. And then add them to pile I mentioned above.)

At the end of each school year, I take out the stack of papers/projects we have kept and sort them into piles for each child. And then I sit down with each of my kids to go through them. We keep just a handful of their favorites and put them into the hanging file folder for that particular school year. Last, I put in their yearbook for that year* (if they have one in the school they are attending). And voila, all finished.

Okay then, any questions I can answer? Head on over to my IG post here, to not only ask your questions, but also to see a photo of our actual school file boxes.

* High school year books are huge, at least where we live. So they do not fit in the file box. Instead, I stack the three high school yearbooks
each of my children receive (in the state we live in, high school is 10th through 12th grade) on top of their file box, so everything stays together.