I have been asked before what do I do with all of the 'stuff' that having five children creates. I will hopefully answer this question over a series of blog postings, but due to the time of year decided to start with this question first; 'how do you store all of the school books and homework each child brings home at the end of the year?' Answer? I don't! Simply put, I don't store it.
When they bring home their bags full of the years work, I set aside a time to look through it, where I enjoy reading some of their stories and answers to RE questions, and then I begin one of my favourite de cluttering routines. I filter.
1. instantly recycle maths and science books (confession: often without even looking through them!) Usually just worksheets and answers- no relevance any more. Also loose worksheets go straight into the recycling.
2. Usually recycle homework books. If there is a particularly good piece, such as a story, or holiday memories, I remove the page to put in their folders (more in a later posting) confession- yes, I do rip pages out of school books!
3. Usually recycle RE, geography and topic books, using the same method as number 3.
4. Read through English, history and art books. If the majority of the book is full, keep for now, if only partially full, remove pages of choice to file in kids folders.
5. This year I added a new step. As I browsed through the books I jotted down any common words that were misspelt and any obvious areas of concern. I will use this as a reference to work on with the kids over the holidays.
And there you have it, my filtering system for the end of school carrier bags. Of course, it is probably a bit of a brutal system for some people, but I just know that it would stress me out more to store bagfuls of school books and worksheets for years than it would to have to potentially explain to my child in years to come why I threw their old maths books away.
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