My oldest daughter J5 is in first grade this year. I had no idea how much junk a kid brings home after being in school all day. During the preschool and kindergarten days a few creative art projects would find their way home every few days. Most of these projects went up on the pantry door until another bigger, better project came along to replace it. The ‘old news’ project then quietly found its way into file 13 (the trash can). Things are a bit different in the big leagues. J5 brings home an entire back pack full of paper each day and we patiently sit down and identify each piece. I found myself finding great little notes with very creative forms of spelling that I just hated to throw away. It was finally time to decide just exactly how much school work I was going to keep.
After much thought and deliberation I decided to award each school grade with a 1″ binder. I have 4 kids who will all be in elementary school for 6 years… that is 24″ or 2 FEET of precious space to devote to school work that will probably never be looked at again. Still, I felt it was my duty to preserve at least a bit of my kids efforts. Here is my solution.
After purchasing 12 (1 inch) binders I made a spine cover and a front cover for each binder (1 binder for every year of elementary school for my two oldest kids). My time is precious so I didn’t want to spend hours typing in names and information so I made everything very generic and hand wrote the details.
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After completing this 15 minute project I now have all the binders ready to add homework for the next 5 years. How great is that?
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I can’t even begin to explain how easy this project was! I could have backed each of my pages with some cute scrapbook paper but this project just didn’t have time for cute. Besides, I kind of like the clean look of black and white.
To print your own FREE spine covers click HERE
To print your own FREE Front Covers click HERE
