These Zipper Pouches Are The Only Thing That Keeps My Daughter’s Desk Organized

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My daughter is six years old, and for about as long the drawers in her desk have been a mess. I tried not to be bothered by it, tidying up here and there, adding little baskets and folders to help keep her organized, but nothing worked. I honestly thought it was a lost cause, and that the drawers would just be terrible until with time and maturity she learned how to keep them clean.

While I still believe that’s true, we have managed to improve things drastically in the meantime thanks to these miracle bags and a new organizing system.

Two things I’ve learned about organizing that have stuck with me over the years: 1) You need to have a system, and 2) While not everything needs to be on display, you do need a plan for those backup supplies. With these concepts in mind I began to sort through my daughter’s desk drawers, putting everything in little piles, and came up with eight categories of stuff: pencils, paper, activity books, markers, stickers, crayons, craft items, paint, and created one pile (the “coloring kit”) that would contain a little bit of everything. Now I just needed something to put them all into!

Zipper pouches aren’t a new concept, but these particular bags were my pick because they’re very large (16×12), which is almost the size of the drawer itself. The price was excellent – $12.99 for 5 bags, and the muted tones of the zippers was a nice departure from the usual all-black or ROYGBIV options found elsewhere online. 

The “coloring kit” is the new go-to grab bag when my daughter needs art supplies. It’s a curated collection of everything she might need to create a masterpiece. It’s easy to grab and, most importantly, easy to put away. The plan for the other eight bags (which is working so far, btw!) is for them to just hibernate until the ‘coloring kit’ needs to be replenished, or until we have more than a handful of kids over and need 800 crayons out at once. 

I labeled the bags (because my first grader is *finally* very into reading!) and explained to her how the system works. She now knows that everything she needs is in the kit, and when she’s done everything goes back in that one bag, it gets zipped, and stuck back in the top drawer so she always knows where it is. The other two bags hanging out in the top drawer are Paper and Stickers, the two items the kit will run out of quickest. As for the bottom two drawers, the plan is that they won’t be opened until the kit needs replenishing, which means they’ll stay super clean! And so far the plan is TOTALLY working!

Listen, I don’t want to come across as, like, the label-making mom who can pull off trendy hats and has a spotless house, because I’m far from it. I’m just a mom who finally opened her Cricut machine and slapped labels on bags in hopes that she could free up some space on the “to-do” list for the next several months. Because these are the tasks that just feel necessary and never-ending but we do them to ensure our kids don’t live in a dumpster of a bedroom.

So yes, the consensus is that I love these bags, we all love our new system, and especially love that it doesn’t have to cost a million dollars or our sanity to teach our kid how to become more organized. If you’re feeling like every drawer in your kid’s room is a junk drawer, you might want to check these out, too!

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