Keeping up home in a busy world: Day 15 - Children's Art work etc.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Day 15 - Children's Art work etc.

Ha! I thought I had this day under wraps, but I didn't. Because I regularly keep up with this, it didn't take long.

School papers

Downstairs on the piano I have a small filing box with a file folder for each child. When my older ones finish a paper, test or quiz that has a grade it is filed in this box. When my younger ones get home from school on Friday, they have a week's worth of papers. Whenever they come, I immediately place those pages in their file. They don't want me to pitch their pages on the spot and usually I don't have time to look at all of them. I also put any pages from AWANA stuff or special things (recital programs, etc.)

I have made the error of throwing away tests, and quizzes and then not having a grade for something. So I do not do much with these pages until the quarter is over and I know we have grades for the report card.

After the quarter, I spend a few minutes sorting through the pages. Usually I pull out one or two school pages from the quarter that I especially like and also the pictures and special papers that we want to save.

This bunch of papers go up in the filing cabinet in my room - the filing cabinet in the picture above. At the end of the year, or sooner than that, it starts looking like the picture above. Papers don't fit, it's too full, and definitely not neat anymore. So I go through these again. I filter out the school pages to one or two for the year, and take the special pages and put them in their memory box. The only pages I leave in these folders are report cards and savings account pages.

The kids have one memory box and if it gets full something must go. They help me with this. Since their memory boxes are totes, no one has really gotten to full yet. They like to sit down and look at the things in this box occasionally, and it's something that I don't de-clutter.

Now, my filing cabinet looks like this.