Organize Kids Papers

Do you just want to throw out every single piece of artwork your child creates? A part of organizing your life as a mom is knowing how to organize kids papers.

We all love the artistic creativity of young kids. They can see the Mona Lisa in a few random marker strokes and they just want to share it with you. But not just share a quick glance, they want you to treasure their artwork the same way you treasure their little heart.

But a mom’s gotta do what a mom’s gotta do – get that little paper into a home of its own. In my upcoming post, 3 Easy Tips for Organizing Paper Mess, I give suggestions of ways to manage those physical papers.

These storage solutions include the gallery method, bins, containers, and a treasure box. In this post, however, I want to show you, in my opinion, what is a superior method to all of those.

Let’s Go Paperless

Sometime around the year 2011, I stumbled upon a life-changing application.  I needed help with organizing my life and in particular: Papers.

I was only in my second year of motherhood and I was already overwhelmed by tasks, clothes, meal planning and, well, everything.  I did my best with planners and notepads but I kept getting lost.

I just couldn’t keep it all organized in a notebook and it was especially hard to find any 1 note that I’d quickly jot down.  But that was all solved with Evernote.

Evernote is an app you can use for free.  You can have it with you on your phone, desktop, laptop, or tablet.  It has an incredible search feature so you can find anything you put into it, even if you don’t categorize or tag it.  Even images and PDFs can be searched.

You guys have heard me talk about this application before in a post where I list all the fantastic ways a mom can benefit from using it.  That post is called, How to Use Evernote for Moms  

Well, one of those fantastic things was how to organize kids papers.

How to Use Evernote to Store Your Kids’ Paperwork

You can digitally organize kids papers very quickly and easily.

No more bins, boxes, tubs, folders, binders and certainly no paper.  

This is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

1. Install the Evernote app on your smartphone.

2. Using the camera icon, take a photo of your child’s paperwork.

3. Save the image into a notebook.

(If you haven’t created a notebook yet, you can do this using the add notebook icon.  Name the notebook either with your child’s name or label it Artwork.  You can even have more specific notebooks like Drawings, Paintings, or 4th Grade Language Arts Projects.)

See, easy, quick and hassle-free.  Then you can get rid of the actual paper if your kids will let you.

If they make too much trouble about it and aren’t satisfied you can either take the images and compile them into a photo book using Blurb, or you can use any of the methods I describe in the 3 Easy Tips post.

One thing for sure, if you get the papers into Evernote you can be done with kids papers for Good!

I found Evernote to be the perfect solution for me as a mom at home, on a tight budget.  No longer do I need to buy notebooks to keep track of things and the application is free. 

If you’d like to explore how Evernote could work for you, visit my post How to Use Evernote for Moms for ideas of how to use it plus a free step-by-step quick start tutorial.