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Entries Tagged 'Kids Organizing' ↓
Lunch Snacks
It’s time to get organized for the new school year and know your kids will need to eat lunch five days a week. How can you save yourself some time and also some lunch time hassles this year? Follow these 5 organizing tips for lunch time success!
Organizing Tip #1: Create a lunch making kit. Place all of the items you use regularly close to the area where you or your kids make their lunch. You may want to include lunch sacks, sandwich bags, snack bars, juice boxes and peanut butter.
Organizing Tip #2: Create a snack bin. Open up the individual boxes of fruit snacks, granola bars and fruit leather and dump them into one big bin. This will eliminate a bunch of half empty boxes in your pantry and kids will know this is where they can go for after school snacks too.
Organizing Tip #3: Decide if the person who is in charge of making lunches is a morning person or a night person. Usually you hear the tip that you should make lunches the night before. Well, I had a friend who is a morning person tell me that it is actually easier for her family to make lunches in the morning as they are all early risers. So, make lunch accordingly.
Organizing Tip #4: Use your school prepay system. You can pay ahead for all of your child’s lunches or just pay for a few lunches for those days that your child would like to buy or you really don’t have the time to make lunch.
Organizing Tip #5: Stock up on a variety of healthy choices to keep lunches interesting for your kids and so you will know that you always have enough on hand to pull together a good lunch.
When you are organized, you know your kids will always have a healthy lunch and you can reduce some morning stress too! Yeah for less stress! 
Tags: DIY organization, get organized, get organized for school, home, Home Organization, Home Organization Blog, kids organizing, lunch, organizing tips
I had to really look around my blog to make sure I hadn’t already written about this book and I was so surprised that I had not as this is a super, awesome book to help your kids get organized for school! I’ve read the book in the past from the library and I recently purchased a used book so I could have my very own copy. Ironically, it was from a library! In the next few weeks, I will be giving a presentation to a group of parents at a local elementary school and decided I wanted to have my own copy to keep as a resource. This book is by Donna Goldberg along with Jennifer Zwiebel and covers organization for lockers, homework, backpacks, binders, planners and more and is especially helpful for middle and high school kids.
Feel free to follow my organizing tips for school and for deeper reading, I would really recommend “The Organized Student!”
Tags: DIY organization, get organized for school, home, Home Organization, Home Organization Blog, organizing tips for school, The Organized Student by Donna Goldberg
One awesome way to help kids get organized this school year is to help them get in the habit of decluttering their backpacks on a regular basis. It may be scary to see what ends up in there-food wrappers, wadded up paper, iPod, broken pencils, invitations your child was supposed to give to you, overdue library books, old homework and a random shoe-your guess is as good as mine!
A common backpack scenario may unfold like this: A few nights before school starts, your child will load up all of their crisp new supplies into their backpack feeling ready to tackle a new year! As the weeks go by at school, they get busy and start shoving things quickly into their backpacks between classes or at the end of the day, including items that should be removed like food wrappers. And just like the rooms in your home, a backpack needs to be decluttered on a regular basis to keep a balance of what we need vs. what we need to get rid of.
Make it easy to stay on top of an organized backpack by following these organizing tips:
1) Choose one day a week with your child that will be backpack purging day, Friday-Sunday are good days to be ready to start fresh for the upcoming week.
2) Find out if your child wants to do it alone or with your help, age will play a role here.
3) Empty the backpack on a flat surface, a desk, a table or even the floor works. Keep a garbage can and a recycle bin next to you.
4) Throw away all of the obvious garbage.
5) Place items of the same type together, just like when you declutter your home. Place paper with paper, notebooks with notebooks, books with books, etc.
6) Start with a pile and start making decisions. For example with the paper pile: look at each item and decide if it should be recycled, or kept (but not in the backpack) or should go back into the backpack or in a notebook. An example of something that should be kept but not in the backpack could be a report card to save, an invitation for a party or notes that will be needed in the future to study for finals.
7) Separate all items that need to be kept somewhere else in your home or returned somewhere else such as books to the library.
8) Make sure you create homes for all of the items returning to the backpack . Make sure papers are organized in notebooks and supplies like pens and pencils are corralled in a pencil case or a special pocket so you child knows where to find them every time.
When maintenance happens on a weekly basis then things can’t get too out of control, parent and kid stress will be reduced and your kids will learn the valuable skill of organization-yeah!
Tags: backpacks, books, declutter your home, DIY organization, get organized, get organized for school, home, Home Organization, Home Organization Blog, homework, iPod, organizing tips
school supplies for kids
Can you imagine hitting hard times and not being able to buy school supplies for your kids? It just makes me cringe to think about it. I cannot imagine telling my kids that we don’t have the money to buy their supplies. It makes me sad to think about the hit that a child’s dignity would take if they had to show up at school without supplies while other students showed up with crisp notebooks, clean erasers, sharp pencils and reams of paper. I live in a nice community and we have people struggling here and it could be any one of us.
I am so grateful that we have a Family Center here where the staff works tirelessly to help these families that are struggling. They are facing a great need this year, estimating 700 students will need to come to them for free supplies. We have 25% of our students in our community receiving free or reduced lunch-wow, wow.
When you get organized for school this year, it can mean reaching beyond your family to help other children arrive on the first day with a backpack full of supplies. This is a great time to take advantage of .20 cent glue sticks and .25 cent boxes of crayons by placing a few more items in your cart to donate to another child. If you don’t have a local family center, you can even bring those supplies to the school as I’m sure teachers will know who needs them the most.
If you have extra shelf space somewhere in your home, then consider stocking up on supplies after school starts. I have seen amazing prices on spiral notebooks and reams of paper at Target after school is back in session. This year I would like to stock up for on supplies that my own children may need later in the year as well as for the Family Center’s school supply drive NEXT year. Now I only condone this type of long-term storage if you truly have the space and these items won’t displace other items in your home (professional organizer’s disclaimer).
Over the weekend we had a neighborhood barbeque and we asked everyone to bring school supplies for the Family Center (photo above). We had an awesome party and today I was able to drop off supplies to help kids who truly need the help and that feels super awesome!
Tags: Add new tag, DIY organization, get organized for school, Home Organization, Home Organization Blog, organizing kids, school supplies, space, Target
School Supply List
Get organized for the school year right off the bat by printing your child’s school supply list from their school website. We start by going through the list and looking for items we may already have at home. We often have school supplies that were brought home at the end of the previous school year or supplies that can be passed from sibling to sibling.
Gather those items and then check them off of the list-done! The next step is to take your list with you when you shop, don’t rely on your memory. You can either knock it all out at once at your favorite office supply store or you can scan ads before you leave home and map out all the good deals at different stores. Fortunately, when it comes to school supplies, every store seems to have awesome prices! I actually really enjoy buying school supplies, I love all of those crisp new supplies at .20 cents, .50 cents or $1.00! Plus, I do like mulling over the fact that we will soon be back to a regular routine again. I also think about what I will need during the year in my own office and add a few of my own supplies to the list as well.
Make sure you shop early so you aren’t stressed out right before school starts after the shelves have been wiped out. Neither you nor your child need to be stressed out about showing up on the first day of school without everything they need. I would much rather miss a few .20 cent sales and have my child’s bag ready to roll then to wait it out looking for all of the “best” prices.
I have a few other organizing tips for school supplies from a previous post when we were doing all of this last year if you would enjoy reading some more ideas!
school supplies
Tags: DIY organization, get organized, home, Home Organization, Home Organization Blog, how to get organized, office supply store, organizing kids, school, school supplies
School Supplies
Please watch for great organizing tips to help you and your family get organized to enjoy a less stressful school year!
Tags: DIY organization, get organized, home, Home Organization, Home Organization Blog, organizing tips, school
Decluttering and organizing isn’t about clearing a space by getting rid of everything in your path, oh no siree! It’s really about making decisions to let go of what isn’t important to you and about keeping what is important to you. This way you surround yourself by the things that are truly important to you and reduce the clutter that distracts you from it!
Last night my daughter got down her “baby bin” for us to look through. Each of my kids have a keepsake box filled with sweet, little baby items from their past and both of them enjoy looking through them from time to time. OK, so do I. We got everything out and spread them over my bed. There were sweet, little shoes, lots of birthday cards and a much loved binky…Look how cute!
When we were all done going down memory lane, we just packed it all back up neatly and put it back in her closet for the next time we want to remember that she was once a wee baby!
I would love to have you stay and read 5 tips on how to honor kid’s keepsakes right here!
Tags: clutter, Decluttering, DIY organization, Home Organization, Home Organization Blog, keepsake organizing, keepsakes, organize, organizing
This sandbox has been a staple in my backyard for countless years…and it has finally been outgrown. In some ways I’m glad to see it go since it got pretty icky inside when the lid was left of from time-to-time, one more thing on the to-do list. But on the other hand, I’m a little sad to see it go, knowing that my kids are past this stage of playing. Laptops and cell phones have trumped the sandbox. So, last night I diligently scrubbed it out in my driveway and listed it for free on Craigslist, maybe someone else can still get some use out of it. Someone who isn’t old enough for a cell phone yet.
Don’t be afraid to declutter the outgrown toys, books, clothes & interests that your children once had. I often find that parents have a harder time getting rid of these things than the kids do! I think we see the sentimental side of when our children were younger and possibly even much sweeter.
Feel free to create a keepsake box and save some special items or take photos and create a scrapbook. But don’t hold onto too much because we need to move on, just like our kids already have. Bye, bye sandbox, you were awesome!
Your Home Organization Expert-Monika
Tags: books, children, declutter, DIY organization, home, Home Organization, Home Organization Blog, keepsake box, toys
MAMA!
I’ve got a tween and a teen at home so I am officially:
Uncool
Embarrassing (lord help me if I flinch or make a sudden movement in the car with the radio on)
Too loud
Gained too much weight
Don’t wear my make-up right
Too mortifying to see at school
Too awkward to say good-bye to at the school bus
BUT: I’m still Mama.
And who do they know will be there for them when they need me? Mama. And who do I go to when I need her? Mama.
And who did this mama’s mama go to? Her mama. And so the cycle continues. Mamas get on our nerves, they call us too many times, they embarrass us in public and some give unsolicited advice. But in times of stress, times of need and times of happiness, who do we pick up the phone to call-our mamas.
It’s a hard, hard job being on this end of the mama spectrum, feeling overused and under appreciated. It’s no fun to now be on the receiving end of eye rolling and slamming doors. Oh, they look cute, but there’s a whole ‘nother side… And why is it that the grandma mamas get a big kick out of the kids being, “just like you when you were a teenager.” Why is that?!
So keep a balance by treating yourself well, because there may be long periods when your kids won’t do it. Remember, they will turn out to be good people and hahahahahaha-they might even be mamas someday!!
Here’s a little giggle for you from Family Guy. Just for mamas.
Tags: DIY organization, Family Guy, Home Organization, Home Organization Blog, mama
organized home
Mothers are a clever bunch if I do say so myself! Yes, we are! Today I learned a clever little home organization secret from a sleepover seasoned mom. As I picked up my daughter, who was actively searching for her lost shoes, the mom pointed out the list she had typed, printed & posted next to the front door. All the things each girl needed to have in their hot little hands before they hit the door:
1) Cell phone
2) Charger
3) Shoes
4) Sleeping bag
5) Pillow
And probably about 5 more things. What a simple, yet effective tool for scattered, sugar-loaded. sleep-deprived young minds! And great damage control to clean up the house and make sure sleepover mom isn’t left with kid clutter. Hats off to clever moms who come up with simple ideas to make life easier!
Sigh, my daughter never did find her shoes-I don’t know how that happens…At least the list pointed out what we were missing and, no, she didn’t leave barefoot. So, ya, the professional organizer’s kid left the clutter.
What home organization secrets do you have to make your life a lit bit simpler? I’d love to know!
Tags: clutter, Home Organization, home organization tip, moms, professional organizer, sleepover
