This week is my girl's last week of school. Hard to believe we have knocked out another school year already. With the end of the year, I am seeing lots and lots of papers come through the door lately. Now that they are in the higher up grades, it seems like they don't bring papers home all that often, throughout the year. It's like they save it all up until the end, and then dump it all on me at once. So it's definately time to do a little work on their school albums.
I want to back up just a bit, for anyone new to my blog, or for those of you that havn't read any previous posts about my school albums. I am using the original school kit from Becky Higgins. It's hasn't been available for years, but you can occasionally still find some on Ebay. Although I do know that Becky is working on a totally new school kit, that incorporates a lot of her Project Life system.
THIS is the post where I finally forced myself to gain control over the girls school stuff. I had it organized, but I hadn't really gone through the piles. I then posted about what came out of that, and when I finally put all of these albums together, in this post HERE. This was all back in February of 2009. Ages ago, right? A year and a half later, in September 2010, I posted HERE with an updated look at the albums. In fact, I had a video, walking you through one of Alyssa's albums.
So, is anyone still with me, after all that backtracking? LOL. Sorry. Just wanted to cover everything in one post, with all the links and important stuff. Now, back to what I have done recently. The following photos were all taken back in February, of this year. I felt like I had a good amount of papers and school stuff, to spend a bit of time putting some of it away. I find that if I set aside a bit of time, twice a school year (somewhere in the middle, and then again at the end), I am able to keep everything caught up.
When I'm ready to get started, I pull out their albums. I have four albums total set up for Alyssa's school years, and four albums total for Sarah school years. So I just pull out whatever album holds the grade they're in, and the grade I'm working on. I also pull out extra page protectors, in varying sizes. I have the 12×12 pages inside the albums. But I love to add in 8.5×11 page protectors for awards, class photos, and report cards. And I have mixed in the 6×12 page protectors for holding concert programs.
Thoughout the year, I keep two simple folders in a drawer in the kitchen. One for Alyssa and one for Sarah. When they bring home progress notes, report cards, awards, concert programs, school photos, or any random homework or tests, I just toss them in their folder. It's a simple way to keep things in one place, until I'm ready to put everything into their school albums.
Just because I put something in the folder, doesn't mean I will necessarily keep it. The school work, homework, and tests are something I weed though at the end of the year and select just a handful of things to keep.
I always keep the awards, report cards, programs, schedules, etc.
Then I take over the old scrap island (that now resides in the playroom) and spread everything out. I sort papers, trim school photos, put report cards in order, cut out newspaper clippings, and try to make sense out of everything I have saved. It's messy and confusing, even though I'm really only working on one school year at a time. Which I still don't understand. It should be easier, right 😉
The girls have their last day of school on Friday. So my plan is to get everything in order, and then I'll share part two of this school album update. Stay tuned!
Laura Vegas 
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