Welcome Back Week: Helpful Hints {a FREEBIE too!}

You would think that since I’ve been back in school for a week and a half (this makes our 2nd full week), that I’d be ready to link up with one of my favorite blogger friends this week.

Nope. 🙂

Early on this week, I had the worst bout of insomnia I think I’ve ever had to deal with. ZERO sleep on Sunday. Zero minutes, people. Four hours on Monday night. I eventually got up around 3:45am on Tuesday and started “doing stuff” that wouldn’t wake my husband up. If I had tried to Zombie-blog, there’s no telling what kind of “Welcome Back” advice you would’ve gotten! 🙂 My body finally caved in and I’ve gotten real sleep for the last 2 nights. Here’s hoping that keeps up!!

Let’s get down to business.

I’ve tried about a million different ways to keep all of those back to school forms organized. We also have to hang on to every single excuse note, change in transportation note, any kind of communication between school and home – we keep it! All of that paperwork got really overwhelming until last year. (I’m really embarrassed that it took so long to figure it out!) My fabulous partner (remember her?!) was the one who came up with our solution as well.

Credits: Ashley Hughes, KG Fonts, Hello Fonts, Creative Clips, Lovin’ Lit

We each keep up with the information for our homeroom classes, but it ALL goes in one binder. We upgraded to 2 inch binders this year, but we made it through the year with 1 inch binders last year. The secret to our “organization” isn’t the binders – it’s what we use inside of them!

It’s really simple. We put each kiddo’s information sheet in the front of a page protector. EVERYTHING ELSE we collect that year goes behind it (inside the page protector) in chronological order. Everything we collected for our kids that year –and more!– fit into the page protectors. And at the end of the year, we pulled it all out, shredded it, and we were ready to start over after our summer break.

I will say that it was an especially helpful tool when we were talking to parents for the umpteenth time about homework/attendance/behavior/whatever and we were able to pull out everything we had collected during the year. As in, “You can see we’ve been working on this for awhile…” It was a really easy way to C.Y.A for us. 😉

I’m posting a simple freebie tonight! If you like this idea, you can implement it ASAP because I am sharing my cutie-patootie binder covers with you! 

Just click on the picture above to grab it from Dropbox. If you don’t have an account, it’s FREE and it’s a really easy way to share and collect files. I have it on my home and work computers. I love being able to create files at home in my pajamas, save a copy to my Dropbox, and print it off at school!

I made the file editable so you can type in your own name. There’s also a duplicate page without text on the phone image so you can add your own or just delete it to keep it blank.

Enjoy! I’m off to bed… wish me luck! 🙂