The BEST System to Keep Your Kids’ Schoolwork ORGANIZED

3 easy steps to create a home routine for all school papers

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As soon as your child begins daycare or any school program, they will inevitably come home with a backpack full of priceless artifacts from math worksheets and coloring pages to handwriting exercises.  As someone who strives to maintain a tidy home, these innumerable pages were a thorn in my side almost immediately for two reasons. First, my refrigerator only has space for a few pages of paper to be displayed. Second, if I so dared to throw away one of these pieces of paper, my kids will protest and look at me with their sad-little-kid eyes saying “Why would you throw away my beautiful artwork?”.

Therefore, I’ve developed a guilt-free system that provides great recognition, saves the very best, and keeps my countertop clear from unending clutter.  Plus, it sets up your child to expect to stay organized with all of their school papers. Ready to get started? Let’s go!

Lifelong organized children keep their schoolwork organized

We’ve all been there. You just managed to get a room or counter cleared off and picked up and your child enters the room and immediately drops something right in the middle of your clean space. It’s exhausting. It’s frustrating, and it’s something that requires either a defined system that a child can know where to put their things or endless reminders to pick things up. Personally, I prefer the first whenever possible.

I consider myself to be a very organized person, because I have learned to develop organizational system for the items and lists in my life and learned how to maintain that organization over time. I believe keeping yourself organized is a lifelong cycle of developing new ways to organize and then maintaining and refining your systems. A year or two ago, I read the book “Raising An Organized Child” and it gave me some great tips on how to help my kids keep their things in order (by the way, I highly recommend that book, so check it out if you can!).  Within the book, the author talks about how teaching your kids to be organized is something that can be taught through the many routines of childhood. Which seems both very obvious and very brilliant. So although the main purpose of this article is for the parent to set up a routine to keep kids’ clutter under control, the end result is that over time this system should transfer the responsibility to the child, so that they will learn to use an organized system that benefits themselves and the family living space.

 So here’s a quick overview of how the system functions:

Recognize, Collect, and Treasure

Our refrigerator recognition space

STEP 1: Recognize

Develop a “recognition space”, where you put up a featured, current artifact from your child’s school. What do we use? The refrigerator. I find these magnets work really well to hold up the artwork.

Our hanging "mailbox" system, with one slot for each of our children

STEP 2: Collect Everything Together

Hang up a “mailbox” per child, in which all of their school artifacts go to keep their schoolwork organized. All papers that are not in the recognition space go into the mailbox. The mailbox is also where papers retire once their feature is over.

I recommend this mailbox style, because it’s practical and it can fit in a mudroom or entryway. We keep ours behind the door immediately inside. Another key defining point of this mailbox is that it is not “expandable”, so it compresses the folded and wrinkled papers together that keeps the total volume of papers down, which prevents the mailbox from overflowing.

A 13-section file folder, prepared with labels for each grade of K-12

STEP 3: Treasure (or Recycle)

At the end of the year (or semester, if the child’s mailbox fills up), take the whole mailbox, and pick the pieces that truly stand out, and discard the rest. This is hard. But when your child is 18, they will be happy to have a few wonderful pieces of their young artwork and handwriting development instead of a 900-page binder of every coloring page they ever completed.  Above all:

Keep What You Treasure, Recycle The Rest.

Where I have chosen to keep my children’s treasured artifacts is in one 13-section accordion file per child, that works perfectly once the child has reached Kindergarten. In each grade’s section, I keep 3 things per year:

• School photos.

• Report cards/certificates/test scores

• A select few artifacts from their daily work throughout the year, such as a story they wrote, a picture they painted, or a star science exam.

And in keeping the one file, I can relieve my guilt of purging the rest of the papers to keep my home decluttered and showing my children that I truly support their artistic and academic accomplishments and helped them keep their schoolwork organized. Note: for Pre-K and Daycare papers, I follow the system, I just only keep 1 folder of the particularly cute papers that come home.

Why does this system work to keep schoolwork organized?

This system works because it gives every random paper a place to go once it arrives home. It also gives a process that is predictable and repetitive so my kids know what to expect and can rely on the routine of what happens to their school work. Plus, at the end of the year, I know that I have a few treasured examples of my kids’ schoolwork/artwork, pieces that I truly appreciate, and my kids have an established sense of recognition.

How do you get started using this system?

This system takes only a few materials, and only minutes to set up.

STEP 1: Gather your materials.

• A hanging mailbox

• Refrigerator clips for recognition

  • Bonus idea- These are the seasonal magnets that I use to attract attention

• Expandable file folders (1 per child). Although you may not use them for daily work until the end of the year, school photos and certificates go in immediately, so get them now, while you are setting things up.

STEP 2: Gather all the papers together & select what to recognize

Gather all of the school papers from around your home, select a few to recognize, and hang them up on the refrigerator. If you don’t have strong magnet clips, I recommend these ones! Specifically, these magnets are strong enough that they can hold up papers or art projects and not slide slowly down the refrigerator as you open and close the door multiple times.

STEP 3: Put everything else in the child's mailbox

Hang up the mailbox using the included mounting hardware, and place all of the remaining papers that your child currently has in their mailbox. That’s it! You’re set until the end of the school year.

But wait, there's more!

As kids get older, this system is especially helpful if they ever have a problem with a grade in school. With all of their original work collected together in one location, you can find the missing assignment in question in far less time than if the papers were not organized.  Personally, I found this most helpful in high school, when I was very focused on my grades, and would notice right away if one was missing or incorrect.

Extra Credit:

Are you raising an even more organized child? Try letting them develop a system to add subfolders to their mailbox, and then let them color code the labels.  For this, I recommend this label maker and colorful tape as one of the best gifts to set up your child to appreciate the long-term joy in staying organized. This is also the label maker I used to label the expandable file folders pictured above.

Thanks for Reading!

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Cheerfully, Laura