Beyond the Backpack…Staying Organized All School Year

Most kids have been back in school for a week or two now and everyone is getting back into the swing of the “Back To School” routine. If you are anything like me, you start every school year off by saying to yourself “This year I am going to be more organized and STAY that way!”. But as the weeks and months go by, it gets harder and harder to pack those healthy lunches that your kids will actually eat, papers and school work that gets sent home seems to multiply and spread all over the house and you can’t find anything you actually need.

Here are some super simple and easy tips that help make “staying organized” all school year long easier.

Lunches~

Lunches are the big thing that start off great for us…Healthy lunches, complete with cheese and lunch meat cut out in hearts and animal shapes are neatly packed the night before along with a little love note to wish my sweet angels a wonderful day at school. But then something happens and the days get shorter and the amount of things that need accomplished at night gets longer and they turn into whatever is in the fridge or pantry getting thrown into zip loc baggies and tossed in lunch boxes or worse yet, a LUNCHABLE (I despise feeding my kids those things…but they are quick and easy). Oh and the love notes?…well, surely by now they know I want them to have a good day, right? So how do you keep lunches from going downhill? Plan ahead. I found this printable calendar from Organizing Homelife.

I printed it off and placed it in a page protector. I print off the school hot lunch menu and keep it close to the calendar and then each week determine which days I will need to pack cold lunches for. Then when it is time to make my grocery list I plan cold lunches for the days needed and add anything we don’t already have to the grocery list. You can find this calendar here: here

Sometimes deciding what to actually fill lunchboxes with takes the longest. You can find a million blogs and ideas on Pinterest on what to actually pack for lunches so I’m not going to make this another one those, but what I do recommend is take some time to look through those ideas and then write down ideas your kids would like in their lunches. To keep those ideas handy and organized I cut 3X5 index cards in thirds and then wrote Main Dishes, Sides, and Fruit and Veggie ideas on them in different colored ink. They fit nicely into a change divider from a cash box. Next I went and found printable blank notes, inspirational notes, and jokes and printed a bunch of those out in advance and placed them in the divider as well. I know not everyone has extra drawer space, but I felt like it was important to create a “lunch station” and keep all of the containers, lunch boxes, and the newly created and organized “idea and note-holder” in one place so I cleared out a drawer close to the fridge where the lunch menu hangs. This may be the best and simplest organization tip I have. Gone are the days of digging around the tupperware cabinet for that one specific container. Everything is right there…all together…all the time.

And I just had to share one lunch idea that my kids love. These are our version of the pizza lunchables. Mini turkey pepperoni, low-fat shredded moz, and mini flatbread rounds. I also add a small container of pizza sauce and a spoon for spreading and a favorite fruit for a side. Fun and easy!

Schoolwork~

So you look through your kids’ backpacks and pull out their masterpieces from Art class or an adorable story they wrote. Now what do you do with it? I have a hard time immediately deciding if things are “keepers” or not sometimes so I go through it and toss the obvious junk and then anything I think might even possibly be worth keeping goes into this rubbermaid container.
Now when you go to buy a container like this, buy SEVERAL. You can find them cheap at Walmart, or sometimes dollar stores.
Every few months I go through the container and decide what is really worth keeping and it is then separated by child and placed into containers with their name and grade on it. I store all of these in a closet in the guest room. I’m gonna be honest here…I’m not 100% sure what I will eventually do with everything. Most likely I will take photos of their work and create a book (or several) from a site like Paislee Press (mini masterpieces), or Plum Print. There is also an app you can do this with called Artkive. I’m just not sure how easily I will be able to pitch the actual artwork that they created with their own little hands. 🙂

Backpacks~ This one is not exactly rocket science either. Backpacks seemed to get thrown and left everywhere and I had BIG, crafty ideas (thanks Pinterest) about amazing and cute solutions to this problem. Unfortunately the ideas that I had and the amount of time I had to complete them wasn’t quite equal so they weren’t happening. Maybe someday, but in the meantime I bought some heavy duty 3M hooks that weren’t ugly white plastic and created a backpack home. 😉

If you love any of these ideas, please feel free to share or if you have your own I would love to hear them!