My desk has a lot of piles. In fact, my life has a lot of piles. Right now I have a bills pile, a to-file pile, a junk mail pile and couple of project piles. However, I know where my stacks are and what’s in them and most of the time I can locate what I’m looking for pretty quickly.
My son, Kyle, on the other hand is a stuffer. Yes, he stuffs his school work deep into the depths of his backpack to never be seen again. This is all school work. Good reports, finished assignments, homework to be returned. It doesn’t matter what it is, Kyle stuffs it in his black-hole of a backpack and hopes to never see it again. In fact it got so bad recently that I asked the kids to clean out their backpacks and put them in the washing machine, which they did, or at least said they did. Kyle’s came out of the machine a gooey mess of washed up papers, folder, candies, crayons and who knows what else.
That was the first straw.
I hit my end when we discovered a special assignment that was sent home sometime before spring break as we cleaned out the entry way last week. This assignment had very specific instructions to complete and bring back the next day, so the next student could take it home. I have no idea when it entered my house, but I can tell you exactly when it left …
From that moment I’ve been scouring the Internet for a system to make Kyle clean out his backpack every day! There are some amazing resources out there. I set out to duplicate this fabulous idea from I Heart Organizing. I was thinking I would need multiple files for each kid, but when I set out for supplies I got an even better idea (for us anyway)!
I took all the ideas I found online (you can see a bunch of them on Pinterest site) and adapted it into something I thought might work for us. We’ve only done this for a week, but so far it seems to be working. Right at the computer station in the main room of our house is a file for each of the kids. Each file has room for Homework, Forms and Newsletters and Finished Projects. We’ll see how this goes, but this week was much better.
I put together these files with some black cardboard files purchased from Target and applied vinyl lettering with the kid’s names. For Kyle’s I added some card stock tabs to make sure he sees all the labels.
