It may seem like you just finished your spring cleaning, but now that the school year has ended, it's a great time to do some cleaning and organizing:

• Empty all the school bags and sort through everything that your student brought home from school. If you don't need to keep a paper, toss it in recycling or shredding. Discard any school supplies that are no longer useful and store those supplies that are still useful (especially things like scissors, pencil cases, rulers, binders, unused tablets, writing utensils, etc.).
• Gather all of the art projects (including those displayed in the fridge gallery). Decide which you'd like to continue displaying, which you'd like to send to loved ones, and ones that neither you nor your student care to keep. The rest can go into an accordion file or, for even more space saving, can be scanned and saved to a flash drive, a CD, or to the cloud.
• If you are like me, you have a bit of a backlog in your personal email folders. You saved those files for a reason, but, even though the reason has passed, the email remains. Now is a great time to delete what can be deleted and to save the really important things (e.g., receipts for online charitable donations that you will need for your taxes) in clearly labeled folders,
• Now that we're halfway through 2015, it's time to purge your active files of anything you no longer need (read: things that don't support your tax return, warranties, and the like). If you need to keep things from past years, move them to a file box that can be stored out of the way.
• Take 15-20 minutes every few days to clean out extraneous computer files and to back up the files you want to keep. Summer thunderstorms and computers are a bad combination. Don't tempt fate.

There's something about cleaning out the backlog that makes summer feel more summery. You don't have to stay inside on a beautiful day to do these things, but if you are looking for a reason to stay inside on a terribly hot and humid day, it's an option!