What To Do With Kids’ School Papers and Art Work

On the last day of school each year my kids come home with backpacks overflowing with work. This is what it looked like when I had one child in Prep (first year of school) and the other in Grade Two:

I didn’t take a photo of the amount that came home this year (one in Grade One and the other in Grade Three) but I was able to deal with it swiftly because I’ve worked out what is meaningful to keep (for us) and how to reuse or recycle the rest.

I should also give credit to our waste wise school teachers because they don’t go nuts with a laminator or glitter and they often reuse recyclable materials for projects which means there is less waste to dispose of. They also do most of the work in determining which pieces of work are worthy of keeping by sending home a portfolio of work samples and an explanation of what each sample represents.

I haven’t always been good at making decisions about school papers and art work, though – mine or the kid’s. I was about 30 when I finally let go of boxes and boxes of school work from primary school through to university, and when my first born was in kindergarten (pre-school) I began keeping all his art and craft projects too! The clutter drove me mental. Gradually though, through various attempts to clean up, I learned which things were worth hanging onto and the Kindergarten teacher gave me a tip to take photos of the ‘grand masterpieces’ so that we still had the memories without the clutter. This definitely helped.

 

1. Determine what to keep

Earlier this week I saw a post from Interior Philosophy which is a very good summary of what I have learned to do over the years to make decisions about what school work to keep. Here is what Tania recommends, which works for me too:

“For me, the point of completing school work is for the child to gain the knowledge, skills and experience; it’s not the pieces of paper themselves. Therefore the benefit and outcome of completing the tasks have already been achieved.

The work is then kept in our ‘special things’ boxes; these are repurposed boxes, for instance, the silver boxes contained my wedding flowers 10 years ago. We each have one box stored on the top shelf of our wardrobe.

2. Reuse and recycle the rest

Next, all unwanted art and craft projects are disassembled into parts and added to our craft supplies. If this ever starts to become unmanageable I will offer it back to the school or kindergarten or another appropriate place.

I take the used pages out of work books to recycle them and keep the blank pages for home writing and drawing. I can’t even remember the last time we bought paper, we just continue to use the left overs from school.

At our school, when the kids are in junior grades they share class sets of pencils, rulers, erasers, glue sticks, scissors, etc., so there is nothing else to sort at home apart from a couple of laminated name tags that go into the waste bin.

However, being in Grade three, my son has returned home with a pencil case full of this stuff and I am concerned that I am expected to buy these items new each year as part of our standard book packs, when they could continue to be used at school. We are using these items at home at the moment but I need to find out more about the situation and my rights. But that’s a blog post for another day.