Organising end of year school chaos

I thrive on being organized!

Anytime I feel out of control – I vacuum…

I thrive on being organized! Anytime I feel out of control – I vacuum. Feeling stressed – reorganize my pantry. Feeling a little bored – move my furniture around. Hmmm…a little sad, isn’t it?

So you can imagine my dread when I see the kids coming toward my car on the last day of school carrying bag loads of – stuff! Anything and everything they’ve collected in their mis-named ‘tidy tray’ at school, gets dumped into a bag on the last day and delivered to me!

In my dreams I reverse my car up to my wheelie bin and dump it all in!

Sigh! But this stuff is my children’s ‘treasures’. They seem unable to part with any of it, much to my dismay! So what to do?

Following are some simple tips to not only help you sort through the stuff but to even save some money along the way…

1. We have a rule in our house. Each child may keep one or two school books that they really like. I favour their writing books. It’s really cute looking back at what they write about! We have a special box that these books go into each year. The rest – ditch!

2. Any good artwork, either frame it and make an ‘art wall’ or even better, take pictures of the art and display these. You can display a lot more this way!

3. Most teachers will hand back unused books. Keep these for the following year.

4. Go through their pencil case and reuse rulers, pencils, erasers, scissors, pens etc… Just give them a clean and a sharpen and they’ll look like new. I worked out I saved $110 on my children’s book orders for next year doing those two things above!

5. One year invest in the slip on book covers (a number of websites sell them very cheap) and reuse them the following year. This saves a heap of time, money and fighting with dreaded contact!

6. Unless they’re totally in tatters, throw any material lunch boxes in the washing machine – they come up like new!

So hip hip hooray to recycle and reuse – it’s good for our pockets and the environment!

Renee