In honor of Back To School (yes, that is a defined season, worthy of all caps), I thought it might be useful to share my best tips for organizing all those extra school supplies at home. You know, supplies like those extra 5 gluesticks, of which your kid only needed to take one to school at a time, but it was cheaper to buy a package of 6?
School supplies often get mixed in with the home office supplies and craft supplies, so this whole “Supply” area of the house can get chaotic quickly!
First of all, separate out the “paper-based” school supplies (e.g. notebooks, folders, binders, dividers, loose leaf paper, etc.) from the rest of the school supplies (e.g. gluesticks, pencils, crayons, scissors, etc.)
Next, the easiest way to store these two categories of school supplies is to give each category its own bin (labeled, of course!) on a shelf. The two red bins in the pic below hold the two categories of school supplies at my client’s house:
You could just leave it at that, and that would be good enough. But sometimes it’s fun — and more appealing to kids — to separate the colored crayons, markers and pencils by color and display them in jars. This way they are more accessible to the kids while adding a fun pop of color to their rooms (see below).
I have used this method in my own house with a box lid and red plastic cups:
One last tip for organizing kids’ school supplies: Store them in ONE place in the house so you and your kids can find them when you need them. This way, you won’t waste money on buying more school supplies throughout the year simply because you couldn’t find what you needed at home. Think of the money you will save, Parents of the World!