heartofdakota.com

This might be obvious to many, but it was a lightbulb moment for me! You know how most construction paper comes with the colors separated (ie: in order of red, pink, purple, blue, white, black, repeat the pattern, etc). Well, I've always had the paper in a cabinet and we had to sort through the whole pile to find what we wanted. Well, a friend of mine and I came up with the idea to sort them into the individual colors and file them - all red together, all blue together, etc. So now, we can get it without sorting through the papers, accidentally messing up papers, shuffling them all around, etc. I have them in a little file box now, and I feel so "together"! ha! I'm hoping it will help my kids with getting more independent on doing their projects, as well, because they now have easy access to the paper.

I'm in the process of organizing everything to start school in a month or less, so... I'll be searching the board for other organization ideas. I know they are out there, but if you have a simple one to share... especially about what you do with all of the pencils, pens, tape, glue, etc, I'd appreciate it!

What a great idea! My construction paper is in a terrible mess!

For school supplies I have a little 3 drawer box that fits on my bookcase shelf next to our books we are currently using. The top drawer has pencils, mini stapler, single hole punch, glue sticks and sticky note tabs. The middle drawer has magnifying glasses, small paint palettes and I'm sure something else. The bottom drawer my toddler can reach (he's very tall for his age!) So its full of crayons and colored pencils for him to do his "school work" with the girls. Our bigger art supplies are on the top shelf with our books we aren't using currently.

I buy mine pre-sorted. It's a really large pack from crayola and every year during the back to school sales, Toys R' Us sells it for "buy one, get 2 free". It is a really good deal. I just picked it up about 2 weeks ago, along with crayons and markers (same buy 1, get 2 free deal).

It really is so much easier to have it seperated by color!

My best organizational friend is a peg board. My kids each have one. I cut them spray painted them and then trimmed them with a glue gun and gimp. You can decorate tin cans and put holes in them to hold pencils, erasers, scissors, glue sticks tape, even art supplies just by using a crate or making holes in some plastic containers and hanging them on the pegboard. They will hold those small mini crates that wallmart sells. Rulers can hang on them. I also have a large one in our craft room which is mostly a sewing room for us all. It is a life saver. Those things you can never find are always found easily on the peg board. You can get the pegboard at home depot and paint it with spray paint after you cut it to size. You can frame them with wood trim of you want too. I went with a fabric trim because it is cheaper. You can search google images for some ideas.

I listed this one a while ago but if you sew fabric covered milk crates are wonderful! http://lauragunn.typepad.com/theundercovercrate.pdf

Thanks for the ideas, ladies!