Back To School: Paper Management for Kids

Manilla Blog

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Posted: 18 Aug 2011 10:49 AM PDT Summertime is a welcome respite from the flood of permission slips, artwork, tests, homework and other education-related paper your kids bring home, but it all starts up again after the pool closes. The good news is back to school is a great opportunity to begin teaching your kids to manage their own paper, which is a skill they will use for the rest of their lives. If you were teaching your kids to organize train cars, wouldn’t you advise them to separate the cars not by their color or size, but rather by their cargo? All cars carrying textiles go to this yard, cars carrying fruit go to this yard and cars carrying gravel go to this yard. The cars’ contents create a point of reference when you want to find a specific car. You can use the same concept for teaching your kids paper management. Like the train cars are just vehicles to contain their contents, paper is merely the vehicle that information travels on. The key to managing paper is to think of it in terms of the information it carries, just like the train cars. Setting up a system for kids to manage their own school papers is simple and important to your child’s success at school and later in life. Step One: Place organizing tools in an area where kids come into the house or where you process your other household papers. Your system should include spots for action items, items to be filed and for artwork to live. Anything that will corral a group of papers will do — baskets, boxes, clipboards, trays or wall bins are all perfectly fine, as long as your child can reach them and they’re clearly labeled. Assign your child the responsibility of filing the “to be filed” items on a weekly or bi-monthly basis. Create filing criteria and write it down at the beginning of the school year. When your child knows in advance the criteria which information to save, processing paper and decision-making become easy. For example, your to-be-filed list might automatically include: o   Test papers o   Report cards o   Grades o   Medical papers from school Over and above those items, your child can be in charge of deciding what needs to be kept for future reference and what can be recycled. Step Two: Create a regular routine to process school (and household) papers. Don’t let your child dump his backpack on the floor and run off to play right away. Empty the pack together, reviewing the papers in his notebooks, and any papers that require your signature. Ask him to help identify the information, figure out what its next action is and have him place the paper in the proper spot. This paper triage process is very valuable because it makes kids accountable for their own information, it teaches them to methodically process information one piece at a time, and it creates the habit of relying on systems to stay organized. Step Three: Maintaining your system is the final step. The good news is maintenance just means emptying the system periodically so action items get acted upon and to-be-file items get filed. Maintenance should be a job you and your child do together on a weekly or bi-monthly basis. Remember that “filing” is merely saving the information somehow for future reference. To save space in filing cabinets and to save time doing filing, consider turning all your valuable keepers into digital images. In most cases, it’s not the paper itself that’s important – it’s the information on the paper. So why save paper if you don’t have to? Scanning important papers and storing them digitally makes them portable thanks to jump drives. If your scanner saves and converts documents using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), each document is searchable, maing it fast and easy to find what you need using keywords. For kids, managing paper and information is an important life skill. When your kids learn to handle this aspect of their lives at a young age they’ll have a leg up when they go off to college and out into the business world after graduation too.